Friendly reminder that Tailscale is VC-funded and driving towards IPO
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They also had a major ass security issue that a security company should not be able to get away with the other day: assuming everyone with access to an email domain trusts each other unless it's a known-to-them freemail address. And it was by design "to reduce friction".
I don't think a security company where an intentional decision like that can pass through design, development and review can make security products that are fit for purpose. This extends to their published client tooling as used by Headscale, and to some extent the Headscale maintainer hours contributed by Tailscale (which are significant and probably also the first thing to go if the company falls down the usual IPO enshittification).
Headscale maintainer hours contributed by Tailscale
Could you expand on this?
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Corporate VPN startup Tailscale secures $230 million CAD Series C on back of “surprising” growth
Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO).
“Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pennarun said. “Meanwhile, we have an extremely efficient business model, rapid revenue acceleration, and a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed, which means we can weather all kinds of economic storms.”
Keep that in mind as you ponder whether and when to switch to self-hosting Headscale.
I've realized how easy it is to just actually run a network rather than half ass it with tailscale. I recommend this, it's fun.
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Isn’t that the entire design philosophy of tailscale?: reduce friction, at the cost of some security.
If security is your main priority, you should be using more secure options, even if they are less convenient or tougher to maintain.
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Headscale maintainer hours contributed by Tailscale
Could you expand on this?
There's a disclaimer in the readme: https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/?tab=readme-ov-file#disclaimer
The maintainer Tailscale contributes happens to be the lead developer by commit count at the moment.
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Corporate VPN startup Tailscale secures $230 million CAD Series C on back of “surprising” growth
Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO).
“Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pennarun said. “Meanwhile, we have an extremely efficient business model, rapid revenue acceleration, and a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed, which means we can weather all kinds of economic storms.”
Keep that in mind as you ponder whether and when to switch to self-hosting Headscale.
Didnt even work for me, i use mullvad so if i wanted to use tailscale on my android to connect to my desktop, it wants me to disable mullvad unlike on my desktop..
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What's the benefit over just WG?
Your tech illiterate grandma can set it up. It’s that easy.
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Didnt even work for me, i use mullvad so if i wanted to use tailscale on my android to connect to my desktop, it wants me to disable mullvad unlike on my desktop..
Yeah this was a deal-breaker for me too.
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What is even the point of tailscale? What can it do that other VPN solutions don't? I feel like this is a problem that was solved like 20 years ago and still we're coming up with novel solutions for some reason. At my company they want to start using tailscale and I don't see why we don't just set up wireguard on a node in our k8s cluster instead
Because I can have 3 phones, 2 tablets, 3 computers and 4 server on the same Tailnet in 15 minutes when starting from scratch
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Are there better alternatives? I was planning on using tailscale until now.
ive been eyeing up netbird but havnt got around to trying it yet. its fully open source at least, and theyre based in germany is anyone cares about that
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Because I can have 3 phones, 2 tablets, 3 computers and 4 server on the same Tailnet in 15 minutes when starting from scratch
I guess that's neat but I don't think I've ever needed more than one connection to a corpo VPN at a time
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Corporate VPN startup Tailscale secures $230 million CAD Series C on back of “surprising” growth
Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO).
“Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pennarun said. “Meanwhile, we have an extremely efficient business model, rapid revenue acceleration, and a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed, which means we can weather all kinds of economic storms.”
Keep that in mind as you ponder whether and when to switch to self-hosting Headscale.
Headscale is great if you like networking fun, but that aside I'm not understanding why VC funding is such a black mark to the poster. Tailscale doesn't generate meaningful revenue streams as its early-stage, so it has to secure funding to continue operations until they achieve high enough revenue to go public. That's pretty standard in a business life-cycle, though. It seems like the main complaint is that Tailscale is a business. And what about the Linux Foundation? They are funded through private equity. Should you consider switching away because of that?
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What's the benefit over just WG?
Personally, my ISP (T-Mobile 5G) has CGNAT and blocks all incoming traffic. I can't simply Wireguard into my network. Tailscale has been my intermediary to get remote access.
I guess it's time to figure how how to host an alternative on a VPS (I see Headscale mentioned in these comments).
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I guess that's neat but I don't think I've ever needed more than one connection to a corpo VPN at a time
Tailscale/headscale/wire guard is different from a normal vpn setup.
VPN: you tunnel into a remote network and all your connections flow through as if you’re on that remote network.
Tailscale: your devices each run the daemon and basically create a separate, encrypted, dedicated overlay network between them no matter where they are or what network they are on. You can make an exit node where network traffic can exit the overlay network to the local network for a specific cidr, but without that, you’re only devices on the network are the devices connected to the overlay. I can setup a set of severs to be on the Tailscale overlay and only on that network, and it will only serve data with the devices also on the overlay network, and they can be distributed anywhere without any crazy router configuration or port forwarding or NAT or whatever.
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Corporate VPN startup Tailscale secures $230 million CAD Series C on back of “surprising” growth
Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO).
“Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pennarun said. “Meanwhile, we have an extremely efficient business model, rapid revenue acceleration, and a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed, which means we can weather all kinds of economic storms.”
Keep that in mind as you ponder whether and when to switch to self-hosting Headscale.
Meh. I will keep using it
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Headscale is great if you like networking fun, but that aside I'm not understanding why VC funding is such a black mark to the poster. Tailscale doesn't generate meaningful revenue streams as its early-stage, so it has to secure funding to continue operations until they achieve high enough revenue to go public. That's pretty standard in a business life-cycle, though. It seems like the main complaint is that Tailscale is a business. And what about the Linux Foundation? They are funded through private equity. Should you consider switching away because of that?
Yup, I don't know if that is OP's intention, but I would agree myself with the complaint that "Tailscale is a business"
The way I see it, if it's a business it must generate revenue (either now or down the road), and that is enough to have me worried.
I do have a Tailscale registration, and the way they approach email communication is already a yellow flag to me (too many ad emails) -
Are there better alternatives? I was planning on using tailscale until now.
A bunch really, Headscale with Tailscale client, Nebula VPN, Netmaker, Zerotier.
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I've been meaning to switch from Tailscale to Headscale but I have been to busy. Do you have any instructions, write-ups/walk-thrus you could recommend to set this up? I have three sites with 1GB internet I can use. One has a whole house UPS but dynamic IP, another has a static IP but no UPS, and the third is Google fiber with no UPS, but I can use the app to get the current IP anytime. I also own a number of domain names I could use.
wrote last edited by [email protected]No writeups. I tried following the Headscale doc for a test last year. Set it up on the smallest DigitalOcean VM. Worked fine. Didn't use a UI, had to add new clients via CLI on the server. When I set it up for real, I'd likely setup a UI as well and put it in a cloud outside of the US. It would work at home too but any other connection would die if my home internet dies or the power does. E.g. accessing one laptop from another, or accessing the off-site backup location.
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Corporate VPN startup Tailscale secures $230 million CAD Series C on back of “surprising” growth
Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO).
“Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pennarun said. “Meanwhile, we have an extremely efficient business model, rapid revenue acceleration, and a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed, which means we can weather all kinds of economic storms.”
Keep that in mind as you ponder whether and when to switch to self-hosting Headscale.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Tailscale never sat right with me. The convenience was nice, but - like other VC-funded projects - it followed that ever-familiar pattern of an "easy" service popping up out of nowhere and gaining massive popularity seemingly overnight.
I can't say I'm surprised by any of this.
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wrote last edited by [email protected]
That's pretty standard in a business life-cycle, though
I don't know where people ever got the idea that normal = acceptable. I hear this used to justify all sorts of awful crap. It was only ever normalized because users were apathetic.
And what about the Linux Foundation? They are funded through private equity. Should you consider switching away because of that?
Does The Linux Foundation have complete control over Linux?
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Yup, I don't know if that is OP's intention, but I would agree myself with the complaint that "Tailscale is a business"
The way I see it, if it's a business it must generate revenue (either now or down the road), and that is enough to have me worried.
I do have a Tailscale registration, and the way they approach email communication is already a yellow flag to me (too many ad emails)That's not really a justifiable reason, though. The Linux Foundation provides grants and scholarships to the open source community, but they do that through private equity business. So transitively, many open source projects are funded by businesses looking to capitalize on that innovation. Do you consider that when pulling from a git repository? No, that's overbearing. Additionally Headscale is in part maintained by a Tailscale employee. That would surely create a conflict of interest given Tailscale is solely interested in generating revenue.
