Perhaps you should ask why Richard decided that Magit, among all
of the many non-FSF copyright assigned packages that emacs users
recommend to one another, was so intolerable as to justify suggesting
mounting a - to my mind doomed - competing project. It was not as if
all of those recommendations are for some proprietary or non-GPL-V3+
package.
Happily the community has rallied to Jonas' cause and will now try to
bring Magit into the FSF fold.
/john