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>
Saves 328 KB (2.5%) off the minimal binary.
For IoT devices that don't need MagicDNS (e.g. they don't make
outbound connections), this provides a knob to disable all the DNS
functionality.
Rather than a massive refactor today, this uses constant false values
as a deadcode sledgehammer, guided by shotizam to find the largest DNS
functions which survived deadcode.
A future refactor could make it so that the net/dns/resolver and
publicdns packages don't even show up in the import graph (along with
their imports) but really it's already pretty good looking with just
these consts, so it's not at the top of my list to refactor it more
soon.
Also do the same in a few places with the ACME (cert) functionality,
as I saw those while searching for DNS stuff.
Updates #12614
Change-Id: I8e459f595c2fde68ca16503ff61c8ab339871f97
Signed-off-by: Brad Fitzpatrick <bradfitz@tailscale.com>
This updates all source files to use a new standard header for copyright
and license declaration. Notably, copyright no longer includes a date,
and we now use the standard SPDX-License-Identifier header.
This commit was done almost entirely mechanically with perl, and then
some minimal manual fixes.
Updates #6865
Signed-off-by: Will Norris <will@tailscale.com>
Will Norris
Brad Fitzpatrick
Maisem Ali