Could some change be made to the kernel to make that process easier? Do we need better tools to make it more practical?
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/101689/can-you-legal...
If you look at a decompiled code and are influenced in how you write your code by the decompiled code, this is probably a "derivative work" of the original program and not just "reverse engineering" from the way that the computer program works. Copyright for software protects the decompiled code that is written, as a literary work, and anything derived from that decompiled code is also protected..
[clean-room reverse engineering] One group examines the source to write the specs and rundown. Another to make the code again, with no people from group 1 taking to them but for the spec sheet
Good question, perhaps others can comment. The challenge is likely economics, not tooling.
Accepting over the wall low quality code and having a submitter for it who may know nothing about it makes it difficult to work any of this low quality code into the mainline kernel via its resource starved processes.
A modern approach to working around the GPL is to move functions from open drivers to closed firmware.