You obviously disagree but it seems very reasonable to me that 20 year old FSF code should fall into the public domain including for Microsoft or MomAndPopSoftw

You obviously disagree but it seems very reasonable to me that 20 year old FSF code should fall into the public domain including for Microsoft or MomAndPopSoftwareCo or whoever to use. Note that they still couldn't just take the current grep or vim or whatever code and use it; copyright on later revisions isn't based on the first published moment of the same project. Instead the code has tons of changes made within the past 20 years and all of those deltas will still be covered by copyright. Microsoft could only be able to take the code of grep as it was as of 2001. I actually kind of doubt they would, but if that much time has passed and something is still useful it should belong to everyone and not just one person.