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What's the point of the Sign Off feature in Git?
git commit --signoff When should I use it, if at all?
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Sign-off is a line at the end of the commit message which certifies who is the author of the commit. Its main purpose is to improve tracking of who did what, especially with patches.
GIT BRANCHES Devs commonly use --global flag to set config options for current user. Show a log of changes to the local repository's HEAD. Add --relative-date flag to show date info or --all to show all refs.
On the command line, navigate to the repository that contains the commit you want to amend. Type git commit --amend and press Enter. In your text editor, edit the commit message, and save the commit.
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.
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