Recent article asserts that the Novell deal will push some who opposed GPL 3 towards its adoption with its stronger restrictions which would have stymied the Novell Microsoft deal.
I am not really up to speed on all this, but at the 1997 or 98 LinuxWorld in San Jose I attended out of curiosity, both Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds participated in the panels and at the time, Linus seemed so with it and in tune with the excitement, whereas Stallman seemed stodgy and foreboding, warning the community not to get carried away with corporate and user friendliness buzz.
The years since have borne out RS's warnings in spades, IMHO. What happened at VA Linux and other companies, to me, means that they might have avoided a whole ugly roller coaster and distraction and just slowly and modestly built their businesses in an organic gradual way if they had heeded his warnings.
Stallman's vision and criticisms are more comprehensive and skeptical about doing business and about globalcorporations than most, though not dogmatic; he gave an example in the '98 panel of IBM as a corporation that had taken a helpful approach to free software and Gnu Linux.
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