This file was never truly necessary and has never actually been used in
the history of Tailscale's open source releases.
A Brief History of AUTHORS files
---
The AUTHORS file was a pattern developed at Google, originally for
Chromium, then adopted by Go and a bunch of other projects. The problem
was that Chromium originally had a copyright line only recognizing
Google as the copyright holder. Because Google (and most open source
projects) do not require copyright assignemnt for contributions, each
contributor maintains their copyright. Some large corporate contributors
then tried to add their own name to the copyright line in the LICENSE
file or in file headers. This quickly becomes unwieldy, and puts a
tremendous burden on anyone building on top of Chromium, since the
license requires that they keep all copyright lines intact.
The compromise was to create an AUTHORS file that would list all of the
copyright holders. The LICENSE file and source file headers would then
include that list by reference, listing the copyright holder as "The
Chromium Authors".
This also become cumbersome to simply keep the file up to date with a
high rate of new contributors. Plus it's not always obvious who the
copyright holder is. Sometimes it is the individual making the
contribution, but many times it may be their employer. There is no way
for the proejct maintainer to know.
Eventually, Google changed their policy to no longer recommend trying to
keep the AUTHORS file up to date proactively, and instead to only add to
it when requested: https://opensource.google/docs/releasing/authors.
They are also clear that:
> Adding contributors to the AUTHORS file is entirely within the
> project's discretion and has no implications for copyright ownership.
It was primarily added to appease a small number of large contributors
that insisted that they be recognized as copyright holders (which was
entirely their right to do). But it's not truly necessary, and not even
the most accurate way of identifying contributors and/or copyright
holders.
In practice, we've never added anyone to our AUTHORS file. It only lists
Tailscale, so it's not really serving any purpose. It also causes
confusion because Tailscalars put the "Tailscale Inc & AUTHORS" header
in other open source repos which don't actually have an AUTHORS file, so
it's ambiguous what that means.
Instead, we just acknowledge that the contributors to Tailscale (whoever
they are) are copyright holders for their individual contributions. We
also have the benefit of using the DCO (developercertificate.org) which
provides some additional certification of their right to make the
contribution.
The source file changes were purely mechanical with:
git ls-files | xargs sed -i -e 's/\(Tailscale Inc &\) AUTHORS/\1 contributors/g'
Updates #cleanup
Change-Id: Ia101a4a3005adb9118051b3416f5a64a4a45987d
Signed-off-by: Will Norris <will@tailscale.com>
It was moved in f57fa3cbc3.
Updates tailscale/corp#22748
Change-Id: I19f965e6bded1d4c919310aa5b864f2de0cd6220
Signed-off-by: Brad Fitzpatrick <bradfitz@tailscale.com>
In Tailnet Lock, there is an implicit limit on the number of rotation
signatures that can be chained before the signature becomes too long.
This program helps tailnet admins to identify nodes that have signatures
with long chains and prints commands to re-sign those node keys with a
fresh direct signature. It's a temporary mitigation measure, and we will
remove this tool as we design and implement a long-term approach for
rotation signatures.
Example output:
```
2024/08/20 18:25:03 Self: does not need re-signing
2024/08/20 18:25:03 Visible peers with valid signatures:
2024/08/20 18:25:03 Peer xxx2.yy.ts.net. (100.77.192.34) nodeid=nyDmhiZiGA11KTM59, current signature kind=direct: does not need re-signing
2024/08/20 18:25:03 Peer xxx3.yy.ts.net. (100.84.248.22) nodeid=ndQ64mDnaB11KTM59, current signature kind=direct: does not need re-signing
2024/08/20 18:25:03 Peer xxx4.yy.ts.net. (100.85.253.53) nodeid=nmZfVygzkB21KTM59, current signature kind=rotation: chain length 4, printing command to re-sign
tailscale lock sign nodekey:530bddbfbe69e91fe15758a1d6ead5337aa6307e55ac92dafad3794f8b3fc661 tlpub:4bf07597336703395f2149dce88e7c50dd8694ab5bbde3d7c2a1c7b3e231a3c2
```
To support this, the NetworkLockStatus localapi response now includes
information about signatures of all peers rather than just the invalid
ones. This is not displayed by default in `tailscale lock status`, but
will be surfaced in `tailscale lock status --json`.
Updates #13185
Signed-off-by: Anton Tolchanov <anton@tailscale.com>
Will Norris
Alex Chan
Brad Fitzpatrick
Anton Tolchanov