As far as I can tell, the current maintainer wants copyright assigned to the FSF. He is not willing to hand the project over to someone who isn't willing to do

As far as I can tell, the current maintainer wants copyright assigned to the FSF. He is not willing to hand the project over to someone who isn't willing to do that. The proposed new maintainer is not willing to assign copyright to the FSF, and so seems to be forking the project instead. But it's not 100% clear exactly what's going on.