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>
gocross-wrapper.ps1 is written to use the version of tar that ships with
Windows; we want to avoid conflicts with any other tar on the PATH, such
ones installed by MSYS and/or Cygwin.
Updates https://github.com/tailscale/corp/issues/29940
Signed-off-by: Aaron Klotz <aaron@tailscale.com>
The -Environment argument to Start-Process is essentially being treated
as a delta; removing a particular variable from the argument's hash
table does not indicate to delete. Instead we must set the value of each
unwanted variable to $null.
Updates https://github.com/tailscale/corp/issues/29940
Signed-off-by: Aaron Klotz <aaron@tailscale.com>
gocross-wrapper.ps1 is a PowerShell core script that is essentially a
straight port of gocross-wrapper.sh. It requires PowerShell 7.4, which
is the latest LTS release of PSCore.
Why use PowerShell Core instead of Windows PowerShell? Essentially
because the former is much better to script with and is the edition
that is currently maintained.
Because we're using PowerShell Core, but many people will be running
scripts from a machine that only has Windows PowerShell, go.cmd has
been updated to prompt the user for PowerShell core installation if
necessary.
gocross-wrapper.sh has also been updated to utilize the PSCore script
when running under cygwin or msys.
gocross itself required a couple of updates:
We update gocross to output the PowerShell Core wrapper alongside the
bash wrapper, which will propagate the revised scripts to other repos
as necessary.
We also fix a couple of things in gocross that didn't work on Windows:
we change the toolchain resolution code to use os.UserHomeDir instead
of directly referencing the HOME environment variable, and we fix a
bug in the way arguments were being passed into exec.Command on
non-Unix systems.
Updates https://github.com/tailscale/corp/issues/29940
Signed-off-by: Aaron Klotz <aaron@tailscale.com>
Will Norris
Aaron Klotz