Comment by TeMPOraL

> the maintainers are a social construction rather than a matter of property law.

Property law itself is a social construction of exactly the same kind.

A single person or group owning a FLOSS project is also a typical, almost universal case. There's always the person or team, and the canonical repository, that represents what "Emacs" is, or what "sr.ht" is, etc. In practice, for everything except legal issues, this is the same as legal ownership.