> two weeks ago we welcomed Kristoffer Dalby as the newest Member of our Technical Staff. Kristoffer is one of the principal maintainers of Headscale.
> Although Kristoffer is joining Tailscale, we don’t plan to change how Tailscale works with Headscale. We’ll continue to support Headscale as a complementary project to Tailscale — with its own community of users and developers.<p>It'll be interesting to see how this goes. I'm a big fan of tailscale and the work they do, but historically these kind of moves never play out how how anyone intends them to. I hope they the headscale project continues to live on, and continues to have seperate development from Tailscale's internal implementation to meet the needs of the community.<p>Self hosting Tailscale beacons is more than just a "want", or a "desire" for DIY. It's fundimentally about privacy and trust - ANY VPN coordination server has a lot of power as we've seen from compromised business networks. The coordination server has ultimate control, and a malicious one could easily insert their own clients, hijack DNS or even just passively monitor devices.<p>Overall I'm cautiously optemistic, but will probably throw a sponsorship towards Headscale even though I'm currently on the official servers.
>We know that someone could take the Headscale code and try to compete directly with Tailscale, but we hope they won’t.<p>I think Tailscale has a reputation that would beat any rando trying to do this, but given the history of open source usage at a certain large cloud platform, is there any reason they wouldn't offer a rebranded service using headscale?