Every change in GIT (and in the most of modern VCS’s) has an author and a committer. The Log shows an author because we respect authorship even if the author of changes doesn’t have access to the repo or isn’t able to commit code by himself.
Asterisk on the author’s name in the Log means that this commit was created by the described person, but was applied by someone else.
Here is an illustration of how it looks:
There are some common cases when this happens:
- you cherrypicked someone else’s commit
- you rebased branch with someone else’s commits
- you applied
.patch
file mailed to you by someone else - you merged the pull-request via GitHub UI – GitHub does it with its own user but leaves authorship to you.