distributed version control should make it very cheap to maintain a fork.

it would be great if there were a good hosting site (like sourceforge) specifically designed for keeping forks. maybe with support for auto pulling upstream, adding the patches, and making packages.

then anyone could make their own 'go-oo' type project.

at some point the company who wanted the copyright assignment would be so tempted by all the lovely patches in the fork, that they would have to drop the requirement.