It was a unique phenomenon of research and publication outside of the main mathematical journals that ran from 1960 to 1969 at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) near Paris.
More elementary or foundational parts were relegated to the EGA series of Grothendieck and Jean Dieudonné, causing long strings of logical dependencies in the statements.
Thus, under the impetus of various mathematicians from several countries, a project was formed of re-publishing SGA in a more widely available electronic format and using LaTeX for typesetting; also, various notes are to be added to correct for minor mistakes or obscurities.
Legal permission to reprint the works was obtained from every author except Alexander Grothendieck himself, who could not be contacted; it was decided to proceed without his explicit agreement on the grounds that his refusal for the SGA to be re-published by Springer-Verlag was an objection against Springer and not one of principle.
As a first step, the entire work was scanned and made available on-line (see the links section below) by Frank Calegari, Jim Borger and William Stein.
The LaTeX source file is available on the arXiv.org e-print archive; SGA2 appeared in print in late 2005 by the Société Mathématique de France (see https://web.archive.org/web/20091130171320/http://smf.emath.fr/Publications/DocumentsMathematiques/).