What to do when your patch gets ignored

[Valdis Kl=?utf-8?Q?=c4=93?=tnieks]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2022 16:34:03 +0200, Greg KH said:

> Now deleted.
>
> Note, this footer requires kernel developers to delete any email sent
> with it as it is not compatible with the kernel license at all.

I had a standard form letter for that sort of nonsense, which asked if they
wanted us to just hit delete, which would almost certainly leave lots of copies
recoverable off all the systems involved, by any competent computer security
expert, or if they were willing to indemnify us for the expenses involved in
checking our (rather large) e-mail cluster, track down any copies on disk
(including unlinked but not over-written blocks) and guarantee a forensically
secure overwrite, and regenerate backup tapes that didn't include the blocks
that the e-mail landed on in various passes through the queues.

Oh, and the knock-on cost of downtime, as several thousand people would be
idled while the email systems were down.  (We actually once collected some
$300K from a contractor who negligently set off the Halon, for everybody who
couldn't get work done in the 3 hours it took to get everything back up.)now

Other gotcha #1:  We were trying to buy some fairly small equipment under rules
that basically said we could accept the first reasonable offer rather than a
full competitive bid.  One company missed out because they sent *me* the offer
- and I had to send them a reply that said "Nice offer. Too bad I had to delete
it rather than forwarding it to my boss who has approval authority". Guess what
happened while they got their act together and re-sent it?  Yup - somebody else
got an offer in first....

Other gotcha #2: Some legal experts say that blindly tagging *everything* with this
footer rather than doing the right thing and using PGP or other crypto for
stuff that actualy *is* sensitive, is basically an admission that they don't actually
have a *clue* what data is or isn't sensitive.  This can come back and bite them big
time if there's an actual breach and there's now evidence of incompetence....