Fun story: originally, this whole construction cone thing was a student joke. VLC has been developed at a French university, which was under construction when the software was created. The students - possibly cheered up by a few drinks - had fun with some construction cones and ended up choosing it as their emblem.

On the forks aspect, FOSS culture hasn't quite got things abstracted enough here. Yes, forks would happen but a lot of value would be destroyed in a sale of the upstream. Our goal should be to make it totally pointless and that's usually best done with copyleft and many copyright holders. Apt sources could also be more fluid and reputation aware about which repo they distribute from.