So I was wondering - what's the point of the sign-off feature in git? When should I use it, should I use it, etc? I couldn't find any simple explanation, so it's your turn to provide one!
+12
A:
Sign-off is a requirement for getting patches into the Linux kernel and a few other projects, but most projects don't actually use it.
It was introduced in the wake of the SCO lawsuit, (and other accusations of copyright infringement from SCO, most of which they never actually took to court), as a Developers Certificate of Origin. It is used to say that you certify that you have created the patch in question, or that you certify that to the best of your knowledge, it was created under an appropriate open-source license, or that it has been provided to you by someone else under those terms. This can help establish a chain of people who take responsibility for the copyright status of the code in question, to help ensure that copyrighted code not released under an appropriate free software (open source) license is not included in the kernel.
Brian Campbell
2009-12-25 22:39:35
It should be noted that the described meaning is the one assigned to the `Signed-off-by:` commit message lines by the Linux kernel project (and the Git project itself). For other projects, however, such lines are meaningless unless the project assigns meaning to them (e.g. by describing them in the project's documentation; e.g. Linux’s [SubmittingPatches](http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/SubmittingPatches;hb=HEAD) or Git’s [SubmittingPatches](http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/SubmittingPatches;hb=HEAD)).
Chris Johnsen
2010-07-06 22:40:33