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>
In preparation for multi-user and unattended mode improvements, we are
refactoring and cleaning up `ipn/ipnlocal.profileManager`. The concept of the
"current user", which is only relevant on Windows, is being deprecated and will
soon be removed to allow more than one Windows user to connect and utilize
`LocalBackend` according to that user's access rights to the device and specific
Tailscale profiles.
We plan to pass the user's identity down to the `profileManager`, where it can
be used to determine the user's access rights to a given `LoginProfile`. While
the new permission model in `ipnauth` requires more work and is currently
blocked pending PR reviews, we are updating the `profileManager` to reduce its
reliance on the concept of a single OS user being connected to the backend at
the same time.
We extract the switching to the default Tailscale profile, which may also
trigger legacy profile migration, from `profileManager.SetCurrentUserID`. This
introduces `profileManager.DefaultUserProfileID`, which returns the default
profile ID for the current user, and `profileManager.SwitchToDefaultProfile`,
which is essentially a shorthand for `pm.SwitchProfile(pm.DefaultUserProfileID())`.
Both methods will eventually be updated to accept the user's identity and
utilize that user's default profile.
We make access checks more explicit by introducing the `profileManager.checkProfileAccess`
method. The current implementation continues to use `profileManager.currentUserID`
and `LoginProfile.LocalUserID` to determine whether access to a given profile
should be granted. This will be updated to utilize the `ipnauth` package and the
new permissions model once it's ready. We also expand access checks to be used
more widely in the `profileManager`, not just when switching or listing
profiles. This includes access checks in methods like `SetPrefs` and, most notably,
`DeleteProfile` and `DeleteAllProfiles`, preventing unprivileged Windows users
from deleting Tailscale profiles owned by other users on the same device,
including profiles owned by local admins.
We extract `profileManager.ProfilePrefs` and `profileManager.SetProfilePrefs`
methods that can be used to get and set preferences of a given `LoginProfile` if
`profileManager.checkProfileAccess` permits access to it.
We also update `profileManager.setUnattendedModeAsConfigured` to always enable
unattended mode on Windows if `Prefs.ForceDaemon` is true in the current
`LoginProfile`, even if `profileManager.currentUserID` is `""`. This facilitates
enabling unattended mode via `tailscale up --unattended` even if
`tailscale-ipn.exe` is not running, such as when a Group Policy or MDM-deployed
script runs at boot time, or when Tailscale is used on a Server Code or otherwise
headless Windows environments. See #12239, #2137, #3186 and
https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/pull/6255#issuecomment-2016623838 for
details.
Fixes#12239
Updates tailscale/corp#18342
Updates #3186
Updates #2137
Signed-off-by: Nick Khyl <nickk@tailscale.com>
We would only look for duplicate profiles when a new login
occurred but when using `--force-reauth` we could switch
users which would end up with duplicate profiles.
Updates #7726
Signed-off-by: Maisem Ali <maisem@tailscale.com>
I realized that a lot of the problems that we're seeing around migration and
LocalBackend state can be avoided if we drive Windows pref migration entirely
from within tailscaled. By doing it this way, tailscaled can automatically
perform the migration as soon as the connection with the client frontend is
established.
Since tailscaled is already running as LocalSystem, it already has access to
the user's local AppData directory. The profile manager already knows which
user is connected, so we simply need to resolve the user's prefs file and read
it from there.
Of course, to properly migrate this information we need to also check system
policies. I moved a bunch of policy resolution code out of the GUI and into
a new package in util/winutil/policy.
Updates #7626
Signed-off-by: Aaron Klotz <aaron@tailscale.com>
Will Norris
Nick Khyl
Maisem Ali
Aaron Klotz