You seem to confuse what judges have ruled on in some jurisdictions with the original intent and what several legal legal scholars (in the US) believe the termination clause says. See what Harald Welte says about it in his article about the enforcement statement.
It is certainly not the case that this only came up when the GPLv3 was released. As far back as 2000 the FSF has reinstated the rights to distribute when a party permanently forfeited their rights to distribute the code because of GPL violations. The most famous case is that of KDE described here: https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2000090500121OPLFKE
The FSF realized this situation doesn't scale when multiple copyright holders have rights on the same work. That is the reason they cleared this up in GPLv3.
I think we are all in agreement that the original dead penalty in GPLv2 was a mistake in hindsight. It doesn't work in some jurisdictions and where it does, it doesn't scale and has unwanted consequences. It is a good thing it got cleared up in GPLv3. And that The Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement policy says Community-oriented compliance processes should extend the benefit of GPLv3-like termination, even for GPLv2-only works. Like the kernel recently did.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Google. Ex-biologist. @mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer.
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Re: FSF, SFC, and the SFLC
Date: 2017-11-14 11:02 pm (UTC)It is certainly not the case that this only came up when the GPLv3 was released. As far back as 2000 the FSF has reinstated the rights to distribute when a party permanently forfeited their rights to distribute the code because of GPL violations. The most famous case is that of KDE described here: https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/
The FSF realized this situation doesn't scale when multiple copyright holders have rights on the same work. That is the reason they cleared this up in GPLv3.
I think we are all in agreement that the original dead penalty in GPLv2 was a mistake in hindsight. It doesn't work in some jurisdictions and where it does, it doesn't scale and has unwanted consequences. It is a good thing it got cleared up in GPLv3. And that The Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement policy says Community-oriented compliance processes should extend the benefit of GPLv3-like termination, even for GPLv2-only works. Like the kernel recently did.