I'm also not going to start discussing legal issues with random internet people who I seriously suspect are paid actors and/or have been riled up by them. Linus
This has never been a legal discussion, but a procedural transparency discussion. You could simply say "our lawyer didn't ok this", and that's perfectly fine. No one is going to argue against that.
Your action up until now is also exactly what a hypothetical paid actor would have wanted to see happening -- it's not helping **understanding** but rather only extending argument on what would have been a quick response.
Calling everyone "paid actors" don't help. If you have more than 1 minute to waste, I am under my most regularly-used internet handle to respond to you. So has the person who sent the original "revert" patch.
Running a quick grep on the other mailing lists and their commits may also have helped answer that.
Thanks, Peter.