Re: [PATCH] documentation: fix alphabetic ordered list for git-rebase man page

On 03/23/2012 08:28 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Having just checked up on this myself for a project I maintain and was sent a patch without signoff (we shamelessly stole git.git's meaning of signoffs), I have it on a copyright lawyer's word that you can safely forge the sign-off for anything that provides a bugfix without adding a new way of doing things, since only changes that carry a certain amount of originality can be copyright protected.

Fixing an alphabetic ordering is too trivial to grant the author of the fix any right to the resulting work, as are typo-, grammar and one-line syntactical fixes (adding missing braces, etc), and therefore they do not need to sign off on the fact that they have a right to give others the right to use that work, since they in fact do not have the right to restrict others from using it in the first place.

Just thought I'd throw that out there in case you, like I did, run into useful patches you dare not use because the original author gets hard to contact all of a sudden.