The GPL version 3 will take a few months more to come into effect. A March deadline has slipped and it is now looking like it may take until the final quarter of 2007 before the licence is formally ushered in.
This leaves Novell with a short fuse, especially now that both Linus Torvalds and Simon Phipps express satisfaction w.r.t. the new licence. SJVN, on the other hand, is very pessimistic. He believes the process of reaching a consensus might take years. Worth reading.
They don't care about the users and issuing a few bytes with random characters costs them next to nothing. It gives them control over billions of human beings.
If even one media outlet told you in 2010 that Microsoft would fall from 100% (of Web requests) to about 1 in 8 Web requests, you'd probably struggle to believe it