Hi I-NEMO,
Very glad to hear from you! I currently maintain the 777 because I saw that multiple forks were being developed and I had the fear that we might have ended with multiple incompatible forks, so I guess that's exactly matching with your goal for the 777. I was in touch with Hyde until September(ish) 2017, but then I wasn't able to get in contact anymore, although I did multiple efforts to do so over the course of last winter and spring (northern hemisphere that is ). I 'm definitely willing to cooperate with you and hope that you like the improvements several people (including Legoboyvdlp, it0uchpods and others) brought to the 777 over the last year. I do not have to be the main maintainer in my opinion, my coding skills are limited and I only took it on me because no-one else did it.
Because of real life commitments, going through a breakup with my girlfriend and the unavoidable move out from her out of our house, I won't be able to do any development until the end of March, but I plan to continue then. Currently I am contributing directly to FGaddon via SVN, but I 'm totally open to contribute in another repo, pushing stable releases to FGaddon once in a while. For me it is very important that we keep FGaddon as the place where people download the latest stable 777, so we are sure every development keeps compatible and centralised around the main FG repo.
Regarding the licensing you talk about: I'm afraid that the GPL v2.0 doesn't protect you totally from that: everyone is free to use, transform and distribute your work as long as they comply to the license. I definitly hope that this isn't a deal-breaker for you.
Thanks for coming back!
Kind regards,
Isaak