If you read the historical archives, Gnu was kinda late in the game with Linux. They were distributing the Joliets 386-BSD and NetBSD and had some drama with trying to do Linux. Debian is a historical spinoff of this.

I gave a conference talk about this about 4 years ago. There may be slight errors in my recollection

Where would someone read more about that history? Sounds up my alley:)

The efforts people will go to in order to avoid GPL3. Makes you wonder why?

Because large corporations want to take without giving.

Yep, look at Apples 12 year journey of rebuilding everything that was moved up to GPL3.