This has been covered before; the code is still very much in use and not obsolete - yes, the branch used to build the empeg is now orphaned - and the branch point is quite a while ago - but there is much commonality with the code that Sigmatel are now licensing to people buying their chips (ie, if you took the empeg v3 code, you'd find not insignificant parts unchanged in the current codebase, such was the excellence of the sw done in the early days). I'm not saying it could never happen, but as has been noted in the past, the empeg codebase is not abandonware - it's still in very active development (just not for the old platform) - which complicates the business case for letting people licence an old branch of it.

It's sort-of akin to asking Microsoft "seeing as NT3.51 is obsolete now, can we have the source?" - WinXP is a current product and is based on the same code, so there are plenty of commercial issues.

IMO the best option is just to start from scratch and GPL or BSD license it, which then means anyone can work on it, no agreements necessary, and it could also be used on other platforms. Sort of like the Rockbox software except ideally more elegant and modular. One thing that makes this much easier is that the empeg-car is wildly overpowered, so you can do things more elegantly/expansively than you might have to do if you were working on a portable device.

Just my 2c, and obviously I'm even less involved now than I was earlier this year

Hugo