On Jan 20, 2011, at 9:25 PM, Joe Perches wrote:

The authors may be different, but the first git
committer of the patch is different.

The committer is the person that does a git commit
either directly with git commit or git am.

You should keep the original patch author names and
add your own "Signed-off-by:" and not claim authorship
of the patches themselves.

For example, many people send me patches for the ext4 tree.

Even if I get the patches from somewhere else, say the SuSE RPM, I will try to determine the author, and use that as the author field in the patches.  If I put a

From: The Original Author <redacted>

in the patch before I suck it in using git am, it will use the original author in the Author field.   I will add my Signed-off-by, preserving the other Signed-off-by's, and my name will appear in the Committer field, which is as it should be.

-- Ted