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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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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)
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.
To you it isn't, but to some of us it is. For me the standard business cycle is not acceptable because I inevitably end up under the bus whether.
The Linux Foundation isn't a comparable example for me since it's a non-profit. As a result it does not follow the same processes for-profit businesses do, let alone VC-funded ones.
At this point, with everything I know and have experienced about the economy, politics and the world, I am trying to avoid depending on for-profit businesses as much as I can because I'm tired of being run over by the bus.
The problem, though, is that VC-funded projects bite off way more than they can chew from the start and have to enshittify to keep shareholders happy at that level.
Growth for the sake of growth is a fundamentally broken concept. Tailscale provides a free service that many use. They already offer a paid support tier for companies, like other certain FOSS projects do, so why not call it good there? Grow based on actual customer needs, instead of shareholder bullshit "needs" (line must go up 🙄).
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.
Does The Linux Foundation have complete control over Linux?
So, companies should not be allowed to invest in other companies? Who is allowed to invest in companies then? Only private individuals? But those individuals are apathetic, so they have to be made to? Or if they don't want to, then since other companies aren't allowed, wealthy private individuals would need to? Its not normal because its acceptable, its normal because the alternative is fantastical and unrealistic.
To the other point, does Tailscale have complete control over Wireguard? They don't control the technology behind that. They do for their control server tech and to some extent Headscale, but that's not what its built on anymore then what's built on Linux.
The Linux Foundation is not a business.
The businesses that fund the Linux Foundation through private equity are though, aren't they?
Sure. Do you have a point?