This thread has slipped into absurdity. These fringe cases with the viewpoint that free software copyright holders are just biting at the bit to take people to court retroactively for short-term lack of compliance at no fault of the software modifier.
The GPL could be abused by a copyright holder as well, it's just not done. In every GPL violations case I know of, compliance was sought, and compliance was obtained, it's rare for such cases to even be seen by a judge. If such a situation arose where a copyright holder did start engaging in "vengence litigation", debian-legal could certainly discuss whether to continue including the contentious software in "free" regardless of the license.
