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At this point, it's not even clear to me that paying would rectify the legal issue with respect to the GPL. It's an amalgamation of source contributions over time. Any one contributor could, in theory, refuse any consideration other than an open sourcing of the software.

Of course, now I think about it, that could be an easy problem to fix. They say every man has a number.

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Almost all relicensing efforts are actually most hindered by not being able to contact people. If you can't contact someone who holds the copyright to something, you can't change the licensing rights over it.

A lot of projects have copyright assignment, to allow for relicensing. They typically ask for you to assign copyright to them or to a company they control, so that they can still relicense as they see fit, in future.

It's worth noting that if someone can't be contacted, the maintainers aren't out of luck yet. If the contribution is deleted (and then possibly reimplemented later by someone with whom the project _is_ in contact) then the issue is resolved. It can be a lot of work, though, depending on the size and importance of the contribution, and reimplementing the code in a way that doesn't derive from the original submission can be difficult or ambiguous.

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