Look at it from the perspective of someone interested in implementing this: once you put GPL code into a project, you're required to license the entire project under the GPL. That means that anyone trying to implement this format, even other open-source projects (i.e. every browser except for Internet Explorer/Edge, tools like ImageMagick, etc.) would have to relicense their entire project just to use it, which in practice means the format is never going to be adopted.
The tragedy is that there's already a decent license for this exact need:
That would allow e.g. Firefox to use the format as long as they either did not modify it at all or were willing to relicense any changes they made to the image codec itself under the same license, which is a much more reasonable requirement.
This is important because adding a new image format is already expensive. Mike Shaver wrote a good comment explaining why Firefox never shipped JPEG 2000 support due to the expense of having a high-performance, reliable and secure implementation:
If you're adding to that already big cost the requirement that you override the project's decision about what license to use and go through and get permission from everyone who's ever provided a patch to relicense their code, it just doesn't seem likely to happen.
The tragedy is that there's already a decent license for this exact need:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html
That would allow e.g. Firefox to use the format as long as they either did not modify it at all or were willing to relicense any changes they made to the image codec itself under the same license, which is a much more reasonable requirement.
This is important because adding a new image format is already expensive. Mike Shaver wrote a good comment explaining why Firefox never shipped JPEG 2000 support due to the expense of having a high-performance, reliable and secure implementation:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36351#c120
If you're adding to that already big cost the requirement that you override the project's decision about what license to use and go through and get permission from everyone who's ever provided a patch to relicense their code, it just doesn't seem likely to happen.