What is the Sign Off feature in Git for?

git git-commit
Clark Gaebel picture Clark Gaebel · Dec 25, 2009 · Viewed 156.8k times · Source

What's the point of the Sign Off feature in Git?

git commit --signoff

When should I use it, if at all?

Answer

Brian Campbell picture Brian Campbell · Dec 25, 2009

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.

Related questions

How do I undo the most recent local commits in Git?

I accidentally committed the wrong files to Git, but didn't push the commit to the server yet. How can I undo those commits from the local repository?

Read More
How do I undo 'git add' before commit?

I mistakenly added files to Git using the command: git add myfile.txt I have not yet run git commit. Is there a way to undo this, so these files won't be included in the commit?

Read More
How to modify existing, unpushed commit messages?

I wrote the wrong thing in a commit message. How can I change the message? The commit has not been pushed yet.

Read More