After several years without activity or release (see Phase 1), in 2012 Thien-Thi Nguyen volunteered to adopt GNU Alive with the intent to drop the auto-login functionality, leaving only the periodic ping, and furthermore, to do a rewrite from scratch. (This is why his name appears on the copyright notices, solely.)
Phase 2 GNU Alive is released under GNU GPL v3+, with a new feature set (see Features).