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> Just because RMS is a FOSS legend doesn't make him God.

According to RMS he does have ultimate authority over all GNU packages, including Glibc: https://lwn.net/Articles/753661/

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He probably owns some root certs. Likely if he were to start exercising such authority without being an active developer, there would be a fork soon enough.

Isn't that what happened to emacs?

A few times, but so far GNU has held on.

It happened with GCC. Today's GCC is actually a fork of the original, which became the "blessed" version once the forkers and RMS worked out resolved some issues that led to the fork.

The unforked (for lack of a better term) GCC was set aside, and the fork became the official version.

Just for the sake of completeness: the EGCS fork you are talking about was alive 1997-1999.

Fork, take maintainers and contributors with you, convince others to use your fork.

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