What is the Sign Off feature in Git for?

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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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