15 ms·

How did they react to Headscale? I must’ve missed the announcement.

by gessha 1y ago

aspenmayer 1y ago
I'm not sure what they meant, but Tailscale links to Headscale and says this: > Headscale is an open source alternative to the Tailscale coordination server and can be self-hosted for a single tailnet. Headscale is a re-implemented version of the Tailscale coordination server, developed independently and completely separate from Tailscale. Headscale is a project that complements Tailscale — with its own independent community of users and developers. Tailscale does not set Headscale’s product direction or manage the community, and neither prohibits nor requires employees from contributing to Headscale. > Our opinion is that Headscale provides a valuable complement to Tailscale: It helps personal users better understand both how Tailscale works and how to run a coordination server at home. As such, Tailscale works with Headscale maintainers when making changes to Tailscale clients that might affect how the Headscale coordination server works, to ensure ongoing compatibility. https://tailscale.com/opensource#encouraging-headscale https://tailscale.com/opensource#encouraging-headscale
- skydhash 1y ago
  I think that you would've lose those users anyway, so at least leave a good impression on them as they can become advocate when they're in another context where Tailscale is the better solution.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
  The distilled version of this is that they let Headscale, a FOSS, use their proprietary client to connect to the Headscale server rather than Tailscale’s. They don’t need to allow this, they could easily disable that feature and have every right to, but they don’t. This makes the development of Headscale a lot more straightforward since the entire client codebase is just removed from the equation.
  - aseipp 1y ago
    The tailscale client is not proprietary.
    - jkaplowitz 1y ago
      The GUIs for Windows, macOS, and iOS/iPadOS are proprietary.
    - OJFord 1y ago
      GP phrased it a confusing way around imo - proprietary or not, they don't need to give the client the capability to target a non-Tailscale server!
- dgb23 1y ago
  An excellent way to position yourself towards an open source alternative. Everything they do seems to be grounded in an engineering mindset and with respect to users.
  - behnamoh 1y ago
    What are some other companies like that? The ones that have an MBA-driven anti-user mindset IMO: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Adobe, Nvidia, AMD
  - sunshowers 1y ago
    I think they've figured out a way to align their interests with what's truly good for their users. I'm sure a lot of their sales funnel is just nerds like us using Tailscale at home, and then bringing it to their employers. We're really happy Tailscale users at home. No bullshit, just works.
    - baby_souffle 1y ago
      > I think they've figured out a way to align their interests with what's truly good for their users. I'm sure a lot of their sales funnel is just nerds like us using Tailscale at home, and then bringing it to their employers. I can't say for certain (I do not work for TailScale, nor have I ever) but I suspect you are right. TailScale was _immediately_ surfaced in our team's "what could we replace open-vpn with?" conversation recently... precisely because most of us _are_ using it at home and have nothing but praise.
    - godelski 1y ago
      > I'm sure a lot of their sales funnel is just nerds like us using Tailscale at home, and then bringing it to their employers. 100% this. GitHub and WandB also seem to follow this strategy. Honestly, I don't know why this stopped being the dominant strategy. Matlab, Adobe, Solidworks, and many other tools used to be free for students. It's not hard to see how people working with certain software while in school translates to using that same software outside. The same is true for at home! You get frustrated with whatever BS thing your work has and then ask your boss if you can use X instead. I think it stopped because they got too big. Becoming the de facto tool they figured they could charge students and hobbiests too. I'm pretty sure this just lead to more piracy and open source solutions. I mean Coca-Cola still advertises... they sure aren't doing it for brand recognition... everyone knows who they are (same with McDonalds!). They do it to associate feelings. These companies should still do those student and hobbiest versions for the same reasons. It prevents others from displacing you. Companies aren't going to complain about the price and pirate your stuff instead, they have the money. Only hobbiests and students do that stuff... There is one problem... I've seen employees at certain places use personal accounts for business work. Worse, I've seen them do this despite the business already having seats! I don't know why this is going on, but maybe we should do a bit of peer pressure if we want to ensure we keep those free hobbiest licenses. Plus, it puts your business in a legally dubious area. Not likely to get sued, but it sure isn't legal...
xeonmc 1y ago
See https://tailscale.dev/blog/headscale-funnel https://tailscale.dev/blog/headscale-funnel
matthewaveryusa 1y ago
They let it be. The decision is many-fold correct: 1) hobbiests that are obsessed with self-hosting can use it -- tailscale will never see a penny from them anyways 2) some businesses will consider headscale as an escape hatch de-risking if tailscale were to be purchased out by an extortionist (like broadcom's acquisition of VMware) 3) It signals they are doing business in a position of strength: businesses don't buy software, they buy solutions to problems
- godelski 1y ago
  4) Tailscale can benefit from innovations that Headscale finds. Competition can be beneficial for all parties involved. If the Headscale devs make novel contributions and solve problems Tailscale didn't think of or figure out themselves, Tailscale can copy Headscale just as Headscale copies Tailscale. Competition has this benefit of distributing research expenditures. I think it is easy to forget that even monopolies are bad for monopolies. They can benefit by being fat and lazy, but this is at the cost of larger future profits. It's "safer", but there's plenty of competitive markets where there is little risk of failure. At least compared to the risk that naturally exists. 5) Headscale users may convert to Tailscale users. That can happen if Headscale was implemented by a enthusiastic employee who later leaves. Company learned to like the benefits but no longer has the support. This makes a natural conversion. The same thing happens if Headscale fizzles out. I really just don't see how Tailscale really has much, if anything, to lose from Headscale. It definitely has things to gain! The only reason to go after Headscale would be if they are greedy and irrationally fearful. Which the action itself would scare a lot of its users. Tailscale really is in touch with its users and honestly, I'm not sure there's anything negative I have to say about them. They're not creating enemies, they're paying attention to users, and they're just focusing on making a great product. Seems like the ideal strategy that we'd want all businesses to follow.
  - jen20 1y ago
    As I understand it, headscale was implemented by an enthusiast user who became an enthusiast employee, who is allowed to spend work cycles on maintaining it.
Lammy 1y ago
> How did they react to Headscale? I must’ve missed the announcement. They hired the dev: https://tailscale.com/blog/opensource#the-open-source-coordination-server https://tailscale.com/blog/opensource#the-open-source-coordi... Fun fact: Tailscale have an almost-assuredly-accurate count of Headscale users due to how few people disable the Tailscale client's telemetry which by default sends them real-time events about everything you do on a Headscale network. See KB1011: https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic “Each Tailscale agent in your distributed network streams its logs to a central log server (at log.tailscale.io). This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your network.” It's possible to opt out of this spying on Unix/Windows/Mac by starting Tailscale with `--no-logs-no-support` or `TS_NO_LOGS_NO_SUPPORT=true` environment variable (see https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic#opting-out-of-client-logging https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic#opting-out-of...), but it is not currently possible to opt out in the Android/iOS clients: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/13174 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/13174 This is why they had the data telling them they should hire the Headscale dev to nip that competition in the bud before it had any chance to usurp their business by overtaking them in mindshare using their own client. Definitely a sound business decision, but it really really irked me when I realized I was feeding Tailscale detailed usage data for everything I did on my supposedly “““private””” Headscale network despite having no business relationship with them. For an example of how invasive this is for the average user, this person discovered Tailscale trying to collect ~18000 data points per week about their network usage based on the number of blocked DNS requests for `log.tailscale.com`: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/15326 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/15326 The privacy-adversarial behavior made me switch from Headscale to NetBird for my personal network now that it's available in FreeBSD Ports: https://www.freshports.org/security/netbird/ https://www.freshports.org/security/netbird/
- ElectricalUnion 1y ago
  > For an example of how invasive this is for the average user, this person discovered Tailscale trying to collect ~18000 data points per week about their network usage based on the number of blocked DNS requests for `log.tailscale.com`: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/15326 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/15326 18000 data points per week seems IMHO pretty low (only 1.7 requests per minute for a whole network? Unlikely, even my Android phone does way more that 1.7 requests per minute just to ad networks, nevermind everything else on the network summed), it's probably way more. 18000 data points is also a lie, that's a different issue - the issue of UDP DNS sucking in general so your average application/OS keeps reissuing requests if they think the UDP packet got dropped.
neodymiumphish 1y ago
I believe they also hired the developer of headscale!
csomar 1y ago
My guess is they probably don't care because their pricing is really low. If you want to self-host, for any serious company, you need a very resilient setup (multiple servers) because you can't afford to have your "authz" down. If your headscale is down, so is everything in your organization. $6/month/user is then relatively cheap. The savings on self-hosting will be minimal.

How did they react to Headscale? I must’ve missed the announcement.

by gessha 1y ago

How did they react to Headscale? I must’ve missed the announcement.

I'm not sure what they meant, but Tailscale links to Headscale and says this: > Headscale is an open source alternative to the Tailscale coordination server and can be self-hosted for a single tailnet. Headscale is a re-implemented version of the Tailscale coordination server, developed independently and completely separate from Tailscale. Headscale is a project that complements Tailscale — with its own independent community of users and developers. Tailscale does not set Headscale’s product direction or manage the community, and neither prohibits nor requires employees from contributing to Headscale. > Our opinion is that Headscale provides a valuable complement to Tailscale: It helps personal users better understand both how Tailscale works and how to run a coordination server at home. As such, Tailscale works with Headscale maintainers when making changes to Tailscale clients that might affect how the Headscale coordination server works, to ensure ongoing compatibility. https://tailscale.com/opensource#encouraging-headscale https://tailscale.com/opensource#encouraging-headscale

skydhash 1y ago
I think that you would've lose those users anyway, so at least leave a good impression on them as they can become advocate when they're in another context where Tailscale is the better solution.
SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
The distilled version of this is that they let Headscale, a FOSS, use their proprietary client to connect to the Headscale server rather than Tailscale’s. They don’t need to allow this, they could easily disable that feature and have every right to, but they don’t. This makes the development of Headscale a lot more straightforward since the entire client codebase is just removed from the equation.
- aseipp 1y ago
  The tailscale client is not proprietary.
  - jkaplowitz 1y ago
    The GUIs for Windows, macOS, and iOS/iPadOS are proprietary.
  - OJFord 1y ago
    GP phrased it a confusing way around imo - proprietary or not, they don't need to give the client the capability to target a non-Tailscale server!
dgb23 1y ago
An excellent way to position yourself towards an open source alternative. Everything they do seems to be grounded in an engineering mindset and with respect to users.
- behnamoh 1y ago
  What are some other companies like that? The ones that have an MBA-driven anti-user mindset IMO: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Adobe, Nvidia, AMD
- sunshowers 1y ago
  I think they've figured out a way to align their interests with what's truly good for their users. I'm sure a lot of their sales funnel is just nerds like us using Tailscale at home, and then bringing it to their employers. We're really happy Tailscale users at home. No bullshit, just works.
  - baby_souffle 1y ago
    > I think they've figured out a way to align their interests with what's truly good for their users. I'm sure a lot of their sales funnel is just nerds like us using Tailscale at home, and then bringing it to their employers. I can't say for certain (I do not work for TailScale, nor have I ever) but I suspect you are right. TailScale was _immediately_ surfaced in our team's "what could we replace open-vpn with?" conversation recently... precisely because most of us _are_ using it at home and have nothing but praise.
  - godelski 1y ago
    > I'm sure a lot of their sales funnel is just nerds like us using Tailscale at home, and then bringing it to their employers. 100% this. GitHub and WandB also seem to follow this strategy. Honestly, I don't know why this stopped being the dominant strategy. Matlab, Adobe, Solidworks, and many other tools used to be free for students. It's not hard to see how people working with certain software while in school translates to using that same software outside. The same is true for at home! You get frustrated with whatever BS thing your work has and then ask your boss if you can use X instead. I think it stopped because they got too big. Becoming the de facto tool they figured they could charge students and hobbiests too. I'm pretty sure this just lead to more piracy and open source solutions. I mean Coca-Cola still advertises... they sure aren't doing it for brand recognition... everyone knows who they are (same with McDonalds!). They do it to associate feelings. These companies should still do those student and hobbiest versions for the same reasons. It prevents others from displacing you. Companies aren't going to complain about the price and pirate your stuff instead, they have the money. Only hobbiests and students do that stuff... There is one problem... I've seen employees at certain places use personal accounts for business work. Worse, I've seen them do this despite the business already having seats! I don't know why this is going on, but maybe we should do a bit of peer pressure if we want to ensure we keep those free hobbiest licenses. Plus, it puts your business in a legally dubious area. Not likely to get sued, but it sure isn't legal...

xeonmc 1y ago

See https://tailscale.dev/blog/headscale-funnel https://tailscale.dev/blog/headscale-funnel

matthewaveryusa 1y ago

They let it be. The decision is many-fold correct: 1) hobbiests that are obsessed with self-hosting can use it -- tailscale will never see a penny from them anyways 2) some businesses will consider headscale as an escape hatch de-risking if tailscale were to be purchased out by an extortionist (like broadcom's acquisition of VMware) 3) It signals they are doing business in a position of strength: businesses don't buy software, they buy solutions to problems

godelski 1y ago
4) Tailscale can benefit from innovations that Headscale finds. Competition can be beneficial for all parties involved. If the Headscale devs make novel contributions and solve problems Tailscale didn't think of or figure out themselves, Tailscale can copy Headscale just as Headscale copies Tailscale. Competition has this benefit of distributing research expenditures. I think it is easy to forget that even monopolies are bad for monopolies. They can benefit by being fat and lazy, but this is at the cost of larger future profits. It's "safer", but there's plenty of competitive markets where there is little risk of failure. At least compared to the risk that naturally exists. 5) Headscale users may convert to Tailscale users. That can happen if Headscale was implemented by a enthusiastic employee who later leaves. Company learned to like the benefits but no longer has the support. This makes a natural conversion. The same thing happens if Headscale fizzles out. I really just don't see how Tailscale really has much, if anything, to lose from Headscale. It definitely has things to gain! The only reason to go after Headscale would be if they are greedy and irrationally fearful. Which the action itself would scare a lot of its users. Tailscale really is in touch with its users and honestly, I'm not sure there's anything negative I have to say about them. They're not creating enemies, they're paying attention to users, and they're just focusing on making a great product. Seems like the ideal strategy that we'd want all businesses to follow.
- jen20 1y ago
  As I understand it, headscale was implemented by an enthusiast user who became an enthusiast employee, who is allowed to spend work cycles on maintaining it.

Lammy 1y ago

> How did they react to Headscale? I must’ve missed the announcement. They hired the dev: https://tailscale.com/blog/opensource#the-open-source-coordination-server https://tailscale.com/blog/opensource#the-open-source-coordi... Fun fact: Tailscale have an almost-assuredly-accurate count of Headscale users due to how few people disable the Tailscale client's telemetry which by default sends them real-time events about everything you do on a Headscale network. See KB1011: https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic “Each Tailscale agent in your distributed network streams its logs to a central log server (at log.tailscale.io). This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your network.” It's possible to opt out of this spying on Unix/Windows/Mac by starting Tailscale with `--no-logs-no-support` or `TS_NO_LOGS_NO_SUPPORT=true` environment variable (see https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic#opting-out-of-client-logging https://tailscale.com/kb/1011/log-mesh-traffic#opting-out-of...), but it is not currently possible to opt out in the Android/iOS clients: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/13174 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/13174 This is why they had the data telling them they should hire the Headscale dev to nip that competition in the bud before it had any chance to usurp their business by overtaking them in mindshare using their own client. Definitely a sound business decision, but it really really irked me when I realized I was feeding Tailscale detailed usage data for everything I did on my supposedly “““private””” Headscale network despite having no business relationship with them. For an example of how invasive this is for the average user, this person discovered Tailscale trying to collect ~18000 data points per week about their network usage based on the number of blocked DNS requests for `log.tailscale.com`: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/15326 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/15326 The privacy-adversarial behavior made me switch from Headscale to NetBird for my personal network now that it's available in FreeBSD Ports: https://www.freshports.org/security/netbird/ https://www.freshports.org/security/netbird/

ElectricalUnion 1y ago
> For an example of how invasive this is for the average user, this person discovered Tailscale trying to collect ~18000 data points per week about their network usage based on the number of blocked DNS requests for `log.tailscale.com`: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/15326 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/15326 18000 data points per week seems IMHO pretty low (only 1.7 requests per minute for a whole network? Unlikely, even my Android phone does way more that 1.7 requests per minute just to ad networks, nevermind everything else on the network summed), it's probably way more. 18000 data points is also a lie, that's a different issue - the issue of UDP DNS sucking in general so your average application/OS keeps reissuing requests if they think the UDP packet got dropped.

neodymiumphish 1y ago

I believe they also hired the developer of headscale!

csomar 1y ago

My guess is they probably don't care because their pricing is really low. If you want to self-host, for any serious company, you need a very resilient setup (multiple servers) because you can't afford to have your "authz" down. If your headscale is down, so is everything in your organization. $6/month/user is then relatively cheap. The savings on self-hosting will be minimal.