Hi, On 7/31/26 6:34 PM, Aigars Mahinovs wrote:
You've missed significant exceptions that GCC policy grants - grant on changes below "legally significant" limit (~15 lines of code)
That is the same limit they use to decide whether to accept a contribution without a contributor agreement, because it does not create enough of a copyright stake in the project for the contributor to be worth the effort.
For a human contributor, I would expect that limit to be cumulative. If I make 100 "minor" contributions, then it would be difficult to argue that because all of these were "minor", I am not a significant enough copyright holder.
I don't think this exemption has much practical relevance except if someone posts to a career forum that an interviewer talked positively about OSS contributions, then there might be a flurry of "Hacktoberfest"-style single-word spelling and grammar fixes again.
I can see at least some utility in accepting those, as the review work they generate can be done even by people not familiar with the codebase, and they are usually real improvements, and the people submitting them would not have become long-time contributors anyway, so not much is lost if they delegate their knowledge about the codebase to an external service.
Simon
