5 ms·
> We funded the open-source SQLite VFS shim that helped isolate the race condition almost immediately, and will help track down similar bugs in the future. Int
by simonw 2mo ago
> We funded the open-source SQLite VFS shim that helped isolate the race condition almost immediately, and will help track down similar bugs in the future.
Interesting example of a company funding open source - in this case paying for the development of a new and very specific debugging tool.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- binhex 2mo agoYeah, tailscale seems to have leadership with their head on right, I agree with the way they handle a lot of things.
- devmor 2mo agoTheir CEO is a very nice and personable guy too. Has given me and others advice on random topics of his interest with no nonsense plenty of times.
- saghm 2mo agoYeah, this part also stuck out to me: > Because this wouldn’t be a quick or easy fix, we reached out to the SQLite developers for a professional support contract. This was a great decision. It gave us direct access to their deep expertise and experience, and we had many detailed technical conversations about our architecture and our incidents. They were willing to pay to get help solving the problem, and then pay again to make sure that the problem is easier to avoid in the future! That kind of long-term thinking seems pretty rare nowadays...
- jjordan 2mo agoProbably the most refreshing thing I've read in a while. Glad to support them moving forward if this is indeed their modus operandi.
- LoganDark 2mo agoTailscale is the best. It's infinitely better than Hamachi, ZeroTier, etc. My only gripe is that they have some really weird SSO requirements like GitHub, etc. and then that provider becomes a permanent part of your identity.
- felixg3 2mo agoI think their reasoning on not being an identify provider but acting solely downstream is very clever.
- jdjdjebeb 2mo agoY? What's wrong with providing username/password authentication
- LoganDark 2mo agoYou become responsible for keeping those credentials secure, among a whole host of other problems. (Abuse like credential stuffing (more), data breaches (more), account farms (more), and so on.)
- semiquaver 2mo agoBeing an identity provider for anything important is the freaking worst. Exposes you to a million problems. You need human support for login problems and lost MFA tokens, and you are an attack magnet.
- miki123211 2mo agoWhich is why you want magic links. Don't be the identity provider, have the email host be the identity provider (which it is anyway if you have a forgot password prompt). Agreed 100% that nobody should still be using passwords in 2026 though.
- 2mo ago
- throwaway27448 2mo agoThis isn't exactly new; the other model is to just hire them directly. Unfortunately this has not generally led to open source outside of the enterprise world getting similar funding, but it is what it is.
- saghm 2mo agoWhat other examples of companies paying for something specific to be developed outside of their ongoing paid support contract can you point me to? I'm open to the possibility that this is more common than I realize, but I've yet to hear of another example of sponsoring development separately from support contracts.
- x0x0 2mo agoIt's common for databases. This is Percona's business model. They employ core pg/mysql developers and you can buy a support package from them. Same for enterprisedb. Pretty reasonably priced packages (like maybe $10k-ish/core IIRC) get you 24x7 support. I've only had to escalate issues once but inside 10 hours we got a pg core committer to debug some very strange vacuum behavior.
- saghm 2mo agoTo clarify, I'm not saying that support contracts are uncommon. I'm saying that going out of their way to then additionally sponsor development of a specific testing tool on top of the support contract is not something I've heard companies do before, and it's pretty awesome!
- SchemaLoad 2mo agoThey could have just spent $300,000 in tokens to AI slop rewrite SQLite in Rust.
- edoceo 2mo agoThat would be lame. Instead they spent less and improved the world for everyone who used SQLite (which is really a lot of people)
- packetlost 2mo agoAvery is one of the few people I have enough respect for to look up to.
- rcleveng 2mo agoAvery is amazing, reading his writings was one of the highlights of my time at Google. There were many talented and articulate people there, the level of discourse used to be amazing.
- garganzol 2mo agoIn real life, an imaginary "leadership" quickly evaporates upon the first hurdle of any kind until proven otherwise by real actions. If I was in your shoes, I would be very careful with blanket statements like these.
- fragmede 2mo agoThis would be the "proven otherwise by real actions" part. They've been around since 2017 and have had plenty of time to hit various hurdles. Past performance is no guarantee of future performance and it is within the realm of possibility for them to go of change course like Elon did. But who are you? Are your Internet comments some proenoucement of truth that can never ever be taken back? So you said something that, years later, turns out to be wrong. So what?
- AtlasBarfed 2mo agoI wish they'd buy the carcass of Keybase from Zoom. It seems very similar to Tailscale: immense utility from a free-tier product for the general public, which leads to trust and a large enterprise market.
- Corrado 2mo agoWow, that’s a great idea! I loved keybase back in the day and really thought it solved a real world problem in a unique and interesting way. Then Zoom bought it (for some reason) and left it to rot.
- snorremd 2mo agoYou might already know and used "for some reason" as sarcasm. For those that do not: Zoom did the usual aqui-hire. They needed to show their enterprise customers they were taking e2e encryption seriously, so they bought out the guys who did exactly that kind of encryption with Keybase. A shame really, because Keybase was kind of unique in the way the facilitated social proof of identity tied to cryptographic keys. A shame though that they never found a really sustainable business model. When they turned to crypto currency towards the end of their independent run I knew it probably wouldn't last.
- fodkodrasz 2mo agothe UX was so terrible that it was inevitable it won't stick. It was clunky and alien on every productivity platform, I attempted to work in a team leveraging it, and it was painful on windows and macos alike. I just deleted it as I noticed it was responsible of about 30% of active cpu (and battery drain) usage on my mac, while being logged out due to inactivity. Honestly: I never particularly liked it, and I could not feel the concept especially tempting, just went with the team.
- rglullis 2mo agoOr instead of buying Keybase, they could fund https://keyoxide.org/ https://keyoxide.org/?
- 2mo ago
- xyst 2mo agoAt least for now. All it takes is one greedy executive decision to stop supporting headscale. Given it’s an American company, it’s entirely possible.
- jkaplowitz 2mo agoTailscale is Canadian, headquartered in Toronto.
- EastSmith 2mo agoStarted using them like 2 weeks back, happy to see how they work.
- alberth 2mo agoThat's actually SQLite revenue model. https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html
- gavinsyancey 2mo agoReading the article, it sounds more like they funded this by buying a SQLite support contract, and the SQLite developers created this in the process of helping them track down the issue.
- buggymcbugfix 2mo agoNot only are they funding open source, they are actively allowing users to host their own control plane via headscale which is a libre implementation of the tailscale control protocol and developed by an engineer who works for Tailscale by day. This instantly made me trust and like them, even if at first I was cautious because I naturally mistrust anything that gets a lot of hype. I've been running headscale on NixOS, hosting my own tailnet since last year and everything just works out of the box. Tailscale lives up to the hype! <3
- xyst 2mo agoThe only nit on my end is that you have to configure a few settings on client and server to avoid sending diagnostics to TS. For macOS, you need to build the open source tailscale client. Or create file in esoteric file location to opt out using App Store. For iOS I don’t even think it’s possible to opt out.
- bradfitz 2mo agoOh? I thought we added that option on iOS recently. I'll go check.
- chillaranand 2mo agoImportant features like App Connectors won't work with HeadScale. Unfortunately, HeadScale is not a drop in replacement for TailScale. Most people don't realize this until they start self hosting. Due to this, I had to migrate from Tailscale to NetBird, which is completely open source. https://avilpage.com/2026/06/moving-from-tailscale-to-netbird.html https://avilpage.com/2026/06/moving-from-tailscale-to-netbir...
- miki123211 2mo agoIs this because HS hasn't implemented it yet (which is on the community), or because Tailscale does something to prevent them from working specifically?
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- 2afTq 2mo agoNew? The sqlite VSF shim is much older. Nice spin.
- simonw 2mo agoSpin? Looks to me like this is the tool in question, added in January: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/commits/master/ext/misc/tmstmpvfs.c https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/commits/master/ext/misc/tms...