Forking various GNU projects has very little, if any, monetary impact to most of those involved. The key capital in these projects is the contributions of the current key developers. Wherever their code goes, so goes the project.
According to Linux, in a posting Sept 29, 2006 on lkml, when challenged by Andrew Tridgell <tridge@samba.org> on his suggestions that major GNU projects, such as gcc, would fork:
Quite frankly, the FSF isn't actually doing any of the work for any of the tools it maintains any more. And hasn't for a long while.Hint: look up the glibc maintainers opinions on some of these same issues in the past. They had reason to clash with the FSF over a _much_ smaller license change (LGPL 2 -> 2.1).
Thanks, I'm very aware free software coders aren't being paid by the FSF, but as you indicated the FSF does still in many cases have those copyrights assigned to them because the developers believe in the FSF philosophy, and Stallman of course is the creator of the FSF.
Your comment was "There are currently over 5,000 such GNU software packages, as listed at FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory. These packages are critical to all BSD and Linux based systems, including Mac OS X. FSF owns this code.". That is Stallman's power, and unless that Army of developers suddently decides they'd rather commercial companies like IBM etc benefit from their work, instead of advancing Stallman's vision for free software, they will continue coding for the FSF and hence the GPL3.
I've not heard of any major GPL product other than the linux kernel that is advocating sticking with GPL2, there may be some, but are almost certainly a minority in the 5,000 different packages you cited, are they not?