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>
tsconnect
The tsconnect command builds and serves the static site that is generated for the Tailscale Connect JS/WASM client.
Development
To start the development server:
./tool/go run ./cmd/tsconnect dev
The site is served at http://localhost:9090/. JavaScript, CSS and Go wasm package changes can be picked up with a browser reload. Server-side Go changes require the server to be stopped and restarted. In development mode the state the Tailscale client state is stored in sessionStorage and will thus survive page reloads (but not the tab being closed).
Deployment
To build the static assets necessary for serving, run:
./tool/go run ./cmd/tsconnect build
To serve them, run:
./tool/go run ./cmd/tsconnect serve
By default the build output is placed in the dist/ directory and embedded in the binary, but this can be controlled by the -distdir flag. The -addr flag controls the interface and port that the serve listens on.
Library / NPM Package
The client is also available as an NPM package. To build it, run:
./tool/go run ./cmd/tsconnect build-pkg
That places the output in the pkg/ directory, which may then be uploaded to a package registry (or installed from the file path directly).
To do two-sided development (on both the NPM package and code that uses it), run:
./tool/go run ./cmd/tsconnect dev-pkg
This serves the module at http://localhost:9090/pkg/pkg.js and the generated wasm file at http://localhost:9090/pkg/main.wasm. The two files can be used as drop-in replacements for normal imports of the NPM module.