gnu.org/gnu/gnu-struct
> The GNU Project is led by the Chief GNUisance, Richard Stallman, the founder of the project [...] responsible in principle for all significant decisions, including the overall philosophy and standards, and directs the project in carrying them out.
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GNU has many contributors and makes widely used software.
FSF is an ineffective advocacy organization and contributes to the GPL having no teeth.
The GNU project is a hell of a lot more relevant than the silly bureaucracy.
Not sure why people talk about RMS as if he went away.
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The developers of the software choose to be part of the GNU project. That means choosing to be led by RMS. They're free to develop the projects outside of GNU and stop using the branding. That's what they would do if they truly didn't want to be part of an RMS led organization.
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considering GNUs hostility towards projects that decide to leave (sed, nano, GnuTLS) and its insistence on keeping the name and dev tree (and likely remaining the "authorative" source considering their size/fame) as if nothing happened, it's not that simple
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Linux distributions aren't going to use an unmaintained project. They'll follow the developers of the project as they've done in each case like this in the past.
No reason that projects like sed where the FSF can't possibly claim to own a trademark would need to be renamed.
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So yeah, they'd need to drop the GNU branding. In most cases, people know the projects by their generic names like Emacs, glibc or coreutils. The 'g' can simply mean something else for many of the projects. The impact of changing URLs wouldn't really be that substantial either.
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Nearly everyone gets this software via distribution repositories, and I'm sure the package maintainers and especially the project developers/contributors are more than capable of switching to a different URL. I don't really think that it'd be particularly disruptive overall.