I personally think of Linux development as being pretty non-localized, and I work with all the people entirely over e-mail - even if they happen to be working in the Portland area.
I don't use GNOME, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do. I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.
Conversion isn't going to happen. I don't think the GPL v3 conversion is going to happen for the kernel, since I personally don't want to convert any of my code.