GPL Linking exception or transformation to LGPL?

[Jos van den Oever]

On 06/15/2015 09:03 AM, Alexander Potashev wrote:
> 2015-06-15 9:52 GMT+03:00 Jos van den Oever <jos.van.den.oever at kogmbh.com>:
>> On 06/15/2015 08:44 AM, Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Christophe,
>>> I find it awesome. As history shows our contribution model is largely
>>> based on such cases.
>>> Several things:
>>> - as Jos has said unless the code is distributed, no changes have
>>> (even in GPL) to be published; we're not using AGPL
>>> - architectural: to encourage reuse we need to have a library, could
>>> you list the files you're using?
>>> - practical: if you list files that you need we can collect list of
>>> persons that own the copyright
>>
>>
>> The list was attached to the previous mail. The paths are all in relative to
>> the sheets/ directory. The files contain copyrights like this:
>>
>>    Copyright (C) 1998-2002 The KSpread Team <calligra-devel at kde.org>
>>    Copyright (C) 2010 Nokia Corporation and/or its subsidiary(-ies).
>>
>> for f in $(cat /tmp/files.txt |cut -f 1 -d ' '); do grep copyright -i $f;
>> done|sort|uniq
>
> Hi Jos,
>
> More importantly, _all_ the files listed in files.txt are under GNU
> Library GPL v2 only:
>     This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
>    modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public
>    License as published by the Free Software Foundation; only
>    version 2 of the License.
>
> Does this mean we cannot relicense under e.g. LGPLv2.1?

Yes, it's not possible to relicense to LGPLv2.1 without approval of all 
copyright holders. It's also not possible to change code under a 
GPL2-only license to GPLv3 without approval of the copyright holders.

Cheers,
Jos