Commit Graph

4 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Will Norris
3ec5be3f51 all: remove AUTHORS file and references to it
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>
2026-01-23 15:49:45 -08:00
Nick Khyl
0a51bbc765 ipn/ipnauth,util/syspolicy: improve comments
Updates #cleanup
Updates #14823

Signed-off-by: Nick Khyl <nickk@tailscale.com>
2025-01-31 11:33:13 -06:00
Nick Khyl
02ad21717f ipn/ipn{auth,server,local}: initial support for the always-on mode
In this PR, we update LocalBackend to set WantRunning=true when applying policy settings
to the current profile's prefs, if the "always-on" mode is enabled.

We also implement a new (*LocalBackend).EditPrefsAs() method, which is like EditPrefs
but accepts an actor (e.g., a LocalAPI client's identity) that initiated the change.
If WantRunning is being set to false, the new EditPrefsAs method checks whether the actor
has ipnauth.Disconnect access to the profile and propagates an error if they do not.

Finally, we update (*ipnserver.actor).CheckProfileAccess to allow a disconnect
only if the "always-on" mode is not enabled by the AlwaysOn policy setting.

This is not a comprehensive solution to the "always-on" mode across platforms,
as instead of disconnecting a user could achieve the same effect by creating
a new empty profile, initiating a reauth, or by deleting the profile.
These are the things we should address in future PRs.

Updates #14823

Signed-off-by: Nick Khyl <nickk@tailscale.com>
2025-01-31 10:22:20 -06:00
Nick Khyl
081595de63 ipn/{ipnauth, ipnserver}: extend the ipnauth.Actor interface with a CheckProfileAccess method
The implementations define it to verify whether the actor has the requested access to a login profile.

Updates #14823

Signed-off-by: Nick Khyl <nickk@tailscale.com>
2025-01-31 10:22:20 -06:00