FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA)

Any copyright holder can do a one time delegation to a lawyer to sue for infringement. You still have to sign a few papers because it's done in your name, but that's it. This is how the SFLC is enforcing busybox (every new suit requires a new authority from the copyright holders).

So the idea that the authority has to be delegated in perpetuity, like the FLA does is incorrect.

On the other hand, project contributors do die or move on to other things (and change email address). If the infringement of a distributed ownership work is only a small amount of code, you have to be able to find the owners of exactly that code in order to begin a lawsuit.

The main problem with the FLA for the kernel for example is that we'd have to find all the authors to begin using it. However, perhaps there's the case for a better and weaker instrument. Something that permitted X to sue on behalf of developers but didn't do the exclusive assignment rights (the latter are what require all authors). To be effective it would really only need authors covering reasonable areas which will be much easier to put together and provide the same level of infringement protection as the FLA.