There are pros and cons to assigning copyright over free code to a
stewardship organisation, whether its a for-profit company or a
not-for-profit consortium. Magic Banana has mentioned one of the cons,
although I think the OpenOffice example shows that its difficult in practice
for even the most ill-intentioned company to abuse the users of a free
application.
One of the pros is that it makes enforcement of the licence much easier, the
organisation can take care of it rather than the developers having to get
together and organise a complicated "class action" law suit against the
violator. Another pro (also a con if misused) is being able to relicense
without a complication referendum vote of everyone who ever contributed a
patch, for example a change from GPLv2 to GPLv3.
I think the story of the Koha library software is relevant here. The software
was commissioned in the public interest by a government-funded public library
here in Aotearoa, and developed by a small, local development company, who
retained the copyright to the core code. The software was adopted widely, and
both the original company and a number of other companies grew by providing
support and customization to libraries using Koha.
The original development company was eventually bought out by one of its
competitors, and that company was then acquired by another competitor
(classic example of the inherent trend towards monopoly in markets). That
company then owned the copyright over the core code of Koha, as well as
trademarks to the name and logo, website and domain name, code repository
etc. They used this to push further towards monopoly, alienating themselves
from the rest of the developer and support community around the codebase. If
the library that originally commissioned the software had take ownership of
the copyright and trademarks etc, and either continued to act as the steward
of the software or passed the rights on to a vendor-neutral stewardship
entity, a lot of that unpleasantness could have been avoided (for more
details on the fork and surrounding issues see:
http://www.librariansmatter.com/blog/2009/09/19/the-koha-fork-and-being-the-change-you-want-to-see/).
