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>
Pick up a fix for https://pkg.go.dev/vuln/GO-2025-4116 (even though
we're not affected).
Updates #cleanup
Change-Id: I9f2571b17c1f14db58ece8a5a34785805217d9dd
Signed-off-by: Andrew Lytvynov <awly@tailscale.com>
This PR ties together pseudoconsoles, user profiles, s4u logons, and
process creation into what is (hopefully) a simple API for various
Tailscale services to obtain Windows access tokens without requiring
knowledge of any Windows passwords. It works both for domain-joined
machines (Kerberos) and non-domain-joined machines. The former case
is fairly straightforward as it is fully documented. OTOH, the latter
case is not documented, though it is fully defined in the C headers in
the Windows SDK. The documentation blanks were filled in by reading
the source code of Microsoft's Win32 port of OpenSSH.
We need to do a bit of acrobatics to make conpty work correctly while
creating a child process with an s4u token; see the doc comments above
startProcessInternal for details.
Updates #12383
Signed-off-by: Aaron Klotz <aaron@tailscale.com>
Will Norris
Alex Chan
Andrew Lytvynov
Aaron Klotz