Toward a "modern" Emacs

US nonprofits can be dissolved or assigned, or change their interpretation of their mission. They can also sell off assets to fund their mission; museums do this all the time, and any larger nonprofit has gotten rid of a building or two when it was time for a change. As for a volunteer board who would never stray, lots of people and groups have evolved over time.

> And there is a barrier to pulling your code: enforcing copyright when you don't own the copyright is significantly harder.

The Linux kernel seems fairly successful in that. And the structure of Emacs should aid in that; whether or not a Lisp package is owned by the FSF should be irrelevant if they infringed on Emacs, a complete tool without that Lisp package. It wouldn't give them control if that Lisp package was infringed alone, but that's life, and I would think that's pretty far down the list of things the FSF should be worrying about.