Should you commit .gitignore into the Git repos?

Normally yes, .gitignore is useful for everyone who wants to work with the repository. On occasion you'll want to ignore more private things (maybe you often create LOG or something. In those cases you probably don't want to force that on anyone else.

You typically do commit .gitignore. In fact, I personally go as far as making sure my index is always clean when I'm not working on something. (git status should show nothing.)

There are cases where you want to ignore stuff that really isn't project specific. For example, your text editor may create automatic *~ backup files, or another example would be the .DS_Store files created by OS X.

I'd say, if others are complaining about those rules cluttering up your .gitignore, leave them out and instead put them in a global excludes file.

By default this file resides in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore (defaults to ~/.config/git/ignore), but this location can be changed by setting the core.excludesfile option. For example:

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore

Simply create and edit the global excludesfile to your heart's content; it'll apply to every git repository you work on on that machine.