Will Norris
3ec5be3f51
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>
Tailscale
Private WireGuard® networks made easy
Overview
This repository contains the majority of Tailscale's open source code.
Notably, it includes the tailscaled daemon and
the tailscale CLI tool. The tailscaled daemon runs on Linux, Windows,
macOS, and to varying degrees
on FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The Tailscale iOS and Android apps use this repo's
code, but this repo doesn't contain the mobile GUI code.
Other Tailscale repos of note:
- the Android app is at https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-android
- the Synology package is at https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-synology
- the QNAP package is at https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-qpkg
- the Chocolatey packaging is at https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-chocolatey
For background on which parts of Tailscale are open source and why, see https://tailscale.com/opensource/.
Using
We serve packages for a variety of distros and platforms at https://pkgs.tailscale.com.
Other clients
The macOS, iOS, and Windows clients use the code in this repository but additionally include small GUI wrappers. The GUI wrappers on non-open source platforms are themselves not open source.
Building
We always require the latest Go release, currently Go 1.25. (While we build releases with our Go fork, its use is not required.)
go install tailscale.com/cmd/tailscale{,d}
If you're packaging Tailscale for distribution, use build_dist.sh
instead, to burn commit IDs and version info into the binaries:
./build_dist.sh tailscale.com/cmd/tailscale
./build_dist.sh tailscale.com/cmd/tailscaled
If your distro has conventions that preclude the use of
build_dist.sh, please do the equivalent of what it does in your
distro's way, so that bug reports contain useful version information.
Bugs
Please file any issues about this code or the hosted service on the issue tracker.
Contributing
PRs welcome! But please file bugs. Commit messages should reference bugs.
We require Developer Certificate of
Origin
Signed-off-by lines in commits.
See commit-messages.md (or skim git log) for our commit message style.
About Us
Tailscale is primarily developed by the people at https://github.com/orgs/tailscale/people. For other contributors, see:
- https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/graphs/contributors
- https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-android/graphs/contributors
Legal
WireGuard is a registered trademark of Jason A. Donenfeld.