Great article!

"I used it because it was free at the time I bought it."
Bought it for free, huh? ;-)
My recent post Great Artists Still Steal

I'm still feeling special!

I've never heard of a double yolker. Now, I'm hoping to one day experience them!

Back porting fixes and supporting older versions is is a really interesting idea. I would love to see some evidence based analysis of the costs and benefits.

Off hand I think it is generally really expensive. Particularly, with ~3 releases a year. It also encourages some of passive development community to sit on older versions.

The WordPress 2.0 Legacy branch was a good experiment, but recently retired earlier than planned:
http://wordpress.org/development/2009/07/the-word...

Having one supported version (+1 sometimes when new major version) is also most manageable for WordPress citizens.

Having said that was anyone:
* Providing details on how to do this effectively?
* Volunteering to take (some of) this on?

The Linux Kernel isn't an analogous example for a number of reasons, the most striking being:

Linus Torvalds added an additional section to the Linux Kernel license that clarified that "This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls", but without that section that is not the interpretation of the GPL by the FSF as it applies to modules, and that is why the FSF also provide an LGPL license.
<a href="http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/os/Linux/kernels/COPYING" target="_blank">http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/os/Linux/kernels/COPYING

Your statement "That would mean a plugin would be a separate work, and would only have to be licensed under the GPL if it was distributed with WordPress itself." is close, but not quite right I think. Here is a clarified version:
That would mean a plugin would be a separate work, and would only have to be licensed under the GPL if it was distributed with WordPress *code*." Calls to WordPress functions is WordPress code. So, you can distribute (your code) the same code without the WordPress functions under any license you like -- seems obvious, but that is what that legalize is describing explicitly.

Welcome to the team! It's always been a great pleasure collaborating with you, and now I get to do it on a more reguar basis!

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