In the past Ron also disagreed on changing headers by Samsung – taken
from U-Boot I think – saying their lawyers drafted those and therefore it should stay that way.
That's right, you don't get to change other people's headers, especially when the headers are created by company lawyers. They get picky that way.
IANAL (I'm not giving legal advice, yada yada), but I don't think that is how this works. Companies you don't work for can't force you to do X or prevent you to do Y with their files. All they can do is choose to license their files under the GPL (or a compatible licence whose covered work may be converted to it). If they do, the text of the GPL is the only thing that can restrict what you do with them. If they don't, then you're not allowed to submit it to coreboot in the first place. It's not possible to license code as "GPL, *but* you need to buy me a Pony every time you change line 273"... if you try to add your own rules, the code is no longer GPL-compatible and cannot legally be merged into coreboot. And once someone representing that company signs off on a file that says "...blahblahblah under the terms of the GNU General Public license...", their lawyers can't tell you anything as long as you comply with the text of the GPL (well, they'll try to tell you anyway, but you don't need to listen).
I would be in favor of smaller header comments, but I think we should clearly define (and try to enforce) a standard way to write it and if possible migrate old files over.