in the past, there has been mention about the difficulty or manual aspect of verifying whether someone has assigned copyright to the FSF. I'm wondering if we couldn't improve this situation with a very simple web service.
My thought is that you could have a web service where you submit an email address and it returns either true or false if that email is associated with someone who has assigned copyright to the FSF. This provides minimal information, so should not be an issue wrt privacy and could potentially make it easier for those maintaining ELPA (and perhaps Emacs core) to verify if a submission is from someone who has assigned copyright.
If necessary, the service could also be locked down with some level of authentication. Later, the service could possibly be incorporated into semi-automated workflows i.e. you could possibly add a git commit hook which added copyright status to the commit message etc.
The service could be very simple - could even be driven by simple file lookup from a text file that is easy to update when new assignments are made.
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