Subject: Re: GDPR compliance best practices?

From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2018 16:07:39 -0400

On Sun, Jun 03, 2018 at 09:24:17PM +0200, Peter Backes wrote:
> 
> He said: It would be a tyranny of lawyers.
> 
> Let's not have a tyranny of lawyers. Let us, the engineers and hackers, 
> exercise the necessary control over those pesky lawyers by defining and 
> redefining the state of the art in technology, and prevent them from 
> defining it by themselves. For a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 
> What is the better options: To suggest people to pay for legal advice 
> by lawyers, who only offer lengthy disclaimers and such for bypassing 
> the right to be forgotten, or simply discuss technical changes for git 
> which enable its easy implementation, without legal excuses for not 
> doing supporting it?

Why don't you try to implement your proposal then, and then benchmark
it.  After you find out how much of a performance disaster it's going
to be, especially for large git repos, we can discuss who is being
tyrannical.
 
It may very well be that different people and companies will get
different legal advice, and one of the interesting things about many
git repos for open source project is that it is not owned by any one
company.  A change in the git repo format is one that has to be
adopted by the entire open source project, and if a portion of the
community isn't interesting in paying the overhead cost, and sticks
with the existing git repo format, I wonder what the "imperialistic"
(your word, not mine) EU will do --- try to lock up or sue everyone
from outside the EU that refuses to pay the 2x-10x performance
overhead and sticks with the original repo format, such that anyone
who wants to interoperate has to send git pushes in the orignial
format?

But in any case, way don't you send a patch and we can discuss?  As
the old saying goes, "code talks, bullshit walks".   :-)

Regards,

    	       	     	   	  	   	     - Ted