The HEAD version is a bit different (less clear?), although the intent is more or less the same:

"describe changes in imperative mood, e.g. "make xyzzy do frotz" instead of "[This patch] makes xyzzy do frotz" or "[I] changed xyzzy to do frotz", as if you are giving orders to the codebase to change its behaviour."

http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/...