On Wed, 18 Jun 2014, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:

Even though the kernel side is supposed to be GPL, I'm really not happy
distributing it or publishing changes as there are a number of files with
headers which seem to be GPL-incompatible (which I've eliminated from my
tree through updates) but the problem is wonderful git keeps them as
history... and in my tree it's a massive 93 patches, against an old
version of the code (0.8.0.1998) which I then sort-of updated to the
version OLPC were carrying towards the start of 2013.

If you want to remove some files from git history, you may look at the 
git-filter-branch man page.  The first provided examples are most likely 
what you'd need.


Nicolas