GPL Linking exception or transformation to LGPL?

[Jos van den Oever]

On 06/15/2015 09:16 AM, Jos van den Oever wrote:
> 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.

I did not read Alexanders mail accurately, but the answer is still no. I 
realize that it says '2' and so you could argue relicensing to '2.1' is 
a loophole. I take 'only version 2' to mean 'only this exact version'.

BTW KDE has a fiduciary license. For signees of that license, KDE e.V. 
can decide on a relicense.
https://ev.kde.org/rules/fla.php

Cheers,
Jos