Forbes magazine published an article in October 2006 in what I would term was a hatchet job on Richard Stallman. I do not know Stallman personally nor am I writing to defend GPLv3. However, much of the article was in poor taste, particularly when dwelled on Stallman's personal idiosyncracies in somewhat gory, gruesome details.

Subsequently, Novell wrote about the article and refuted some of the assertions made by Forbes. In particular, while the Forbes article mentions that Novell refused to comment on the issue, Novell's blog says that they told Forbes "the industry will works its way through the problem". This is somewhat significant given the past crises that the Open Source community has faced and how they have been overcome. Yet, Forbes not to mention it at all. In fact, the Forbes article is extremely slanted against Stallman. It also makes it look like industry heavyweights like IBM, HP, Novell and RedHat are helpless against the "anarchist", "kamikaze" Stallman.

Further developments in the GPLv3 debate include Sun's announcement that they would release the new version of OpenSolaris under GPLv3. However, Linus Torvalds has weighed in saying this is just a lot of "hot air" being blown around. ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn says Linus is probably right. However, he also says there are a bunch of "lawyer ants" in smaller Open Source firms who are getting busy right about now talking about GPLv2, GPLv3, and DRM.