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Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

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Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#141

Post by dgb23 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #115
LambdaComplex wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand that [Headscale] is (unofficially?) supported by Tailscale these days I'm not sure if it clears the bar of official , but it seems to be not-unofficial. They were planning on open-sourcing a coordination server once they cleaned the code up, but then decided that there was no point in doing so due to Headscale. On top of that, one of the primary maintainers of Headscale works at Tailscale now. Source:…

Sounds like someone may have thought the code for Headscale "coordination" server was higher quality than the code for Tailscale "coordination" server. If the later needed to be "cleaned up". Maybe there were things in that code Tailscale did not want the public to see. Funny how Wireguard's original pitch was that it was smaller and simpler than OpenVPN or other alternatives. Now people are commercialising some comp…

> Maybe there were things in that code Tailscale did not want the public to see.

There are a ton of things you do in closed source “only my small team touches it” vs open source.

Even if it’s just comments, notes files and stuff like that. For example I often leave project notes in comments and address people etc.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#142

Post by dgb23 »

api wrote: post #122
yebyen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't usable if your goal is to take the open source project and turn it into a component of your own commercial product that is for sale and is closed-source. But I think more than half of the people in this thread have the opposite opinion (that if it isn't open source, it isn't usable) and I tend to agree with that.

AFAIK if you are the owner of the copyright / original author you can use it however you see fit. The license applies to third parties.

How would applying patches from the AGPL version affect your code?

To me the AGPL thing feels like all or nothing.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#143

Post by chipsa »

tailspin2019 wrote: post #57
juanfont wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even though I understand that it is (unofficially?) supported by Tailscale these days. https://tailscale.com/blog/opensource/

I was drawing attention to this line in your README: > This project is not associated with Tailscale Inc. :)

Tailscale hired the guy who wrote Headscale, for him to work on software, so they're sponsoring the programmer who's working it, but it's not "Tailscale" software, and they have no warranty, express or implied, because it's not theirs. It's its own project.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#144

Post by dcow »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #115
LambdaComplex wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand that [Headscale] is (unofficially?) supported by Tailscale these days I'm not sure if it clears the bar of official , but it seems to be not-unofficial. They were planning on open-sourcing a coordination server once they cleaned the code up, but then decided that there was no point in doing so due to Headscale. On top of that, one of the primary maintainers of Headscale works at Tailscale now. Source:…

Sounds like someone may have thought the code for Headscale "coordination" server was higher quality than the code for Tailscale "coordination" server. If the later needed to be "cleaned up". Maybe there were things in that code Tailscale did not want the public to see. Funny how Wireguard's original pitch was that it was smaller and simpler than OpenVPN or other alternatives. Now people are commercialising some comp…

I don’t really think your comment is a fair take. While it very well may be “actually what happened”, there are a lot of other reasons to hire from and foster your community rather than try to compete with them. It’s possible Headscale just does a better job at capturing a clean boundary between a public open source tool and a proprietary backend and Tailscale might have just liked what they saw, said well this is essentially how we’d do it, and made the smart decision to put the person on payroll instead of taking advantage of the community.

Furthermore IDK what your gripe is about management tools popping up on top of Wireguard. That’s what Jason wanted, for one. The downstream application use cases are kept out of the secure and simple core. Two just use vanilla Wireguard if you don’t need Tailscale. Are you an OpenVPN shill?

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#146

Post by Joker_vD »

hobofan wrote: post #92
Joker_vD wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice how you actually have compared those two products according to one particularly (arbitrarily?) chosen criterion.

Of course you can compare apples to oranges, but if you know that a huge amount of the population is allergic to citrus fruit, it's just a waste of time to compare their dimensions or prices. It's not arbitrarily chosen, and I wouldn't call it a criterion. I am arguing that they are different products for so different audiences, that all other criteria don't really matter. > both of those products aim to provide secu…

> if you know that a huge amount of the population is allergic to citrus fruit

"But guys, what about lemo—", "John, you know we all except you are alergic to citrus, don't you?", "Oh, sorry, completely forgot, let's move on".

???

I don't understand what point you're even trying to argue. If some misguided manager would come to you and ask your opinion in him chosing between Miro and Figma, presumably you'll ask him a bit about his needs and then reply with something like "Well, while technically Miro would suit you better, what you actually need is Trello" instead of, I don't know, saying "they're not simialr products, no point in comparing them" then turning your back and leaving. Right?

That's an entirely reasonable scenario IMO even if it involves meaningfully (i.e. "yep, one of those is definitely more suiting than another") comparing Trello to Figma.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#147

Post by hobofan »

Joker_vD wrote: post #146
hobofan wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you can compare apples to oranges, but if you know that a huge amount of the population is allergic to citrus fruit, it's just a waste of time to compare their dimensions or prices. It's not arbitrarily chosen, and I wouldn't call it a criterion. I am arguing that they are different products for so different audiences, that all other criteria don't really matter. > both of those products aim to provide secu…

> if you know that a huge amount of the population is allergic to citrus fruit "But guys, what about lemo—", "John, you know we all except you are alergic to citrus, don't you?", "Oh, sorry, completely forgot, let's move on". ??? I don't understand what point you're even trying to argue. If some misguided manager would come to you and ask your opinion in him chosing between Miro and Figma, presumably you'll ask him a…

Image someone drew up a comparison of Miro and Figma which listed a lot of facts that they could be compared on, but left out the parts where one is about designing and the other is about diagramming.

Now, you would like to point out that the collection of facts omits some crucial points, which likely makes the comparison useless. What would you say in that instance? In the english language, the most common idiom that has emerged for that is "that's comparing apples to oranges".

That's what the GP original comment pointed out (I assume). You replied to it, ignoring that point and not really engaging with it, and trying to dismantle the concept of "apples to oranges" as a whole.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#148

Post by TaylorAlexander »

smoldesu wrote: post #116
SequoiaHope wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It strikes me that if you had to build a service platform, then that shows me there is a difference in the systems from a user perspective. I am a very technical user but I do NOT want to spend my time configuring network stuff, that's the whole reason I use tailscale. The fact that headscale is self hosted immediately creates barriers that tailscale does not have. I already host several web servers and it a huge pai…

It's a networking service. Inherently, there are things you will be able to orchestrate easier from a centralized perspective than a self-hosted one. You're correct to nit-pick the difference between Headscale and Tailscale as software products, but I think this is splitting hairs. There are perfectly valid reasons why both are different. Given Tailscale's featureset as a product, it's not reasonable to expect it's s…

> Given Tailscale's featureset as a product, it's not reasonable to expect it's self-hosted alternative to be a pushbutton replacement.

Yeah, exactly. That’s why I started this thread by disagreeing with the tailscale employee who said “we don’t need to open source tailscale because headscale already exists.”

Headscale and tailscale are not the same. I want to use tailscale, and I would love it if tailscale was open source! If truly the only reason they’re not open sourcing tailscale is that headscale exists, they’re kind of missing that existing tailscale customers will not all see headscale as a replacement but might still prefer open source.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#149

Post by smoldesu »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #148
smoldesu wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a networking service. Inherently, there are things you will be able to orchestrate easier from a centralized perspective than a self-hosted one. You're correct to nit-pick the difference between Headscale and Tailscale as software products, but I think this is splitting hairs. There are perfectly valid reasons why both are different. Given Tailscale's featureset as a product, it's not reasonable to expect it's s…

> Given Tailscale's featureset as a product, it's not reasonable to expect it's self-hosted alternative to be a pushbutton replacement. Yeah, exactly. That’s why I started this thread by disagreeing with the tailscale employee who said “we don’t need to open source tailscale because headscale already exists.” Headscale and tailscale are not the same. I want to use tailscale, and I would love it if tailscale was open…

I don't think it is possible to Open Source the entirety of Tailscale, is what I'm saying. Their product is deeply intertwined with system providers, autoscalers and load balancers.

There's a world in which they "open source" Tailscale in the form of a massive K8s spec, which costs ~$400/day to operate for a single user. But... nobody would really use it. If Headscale offers most of the features with much less overhead/configuration, it's a perfectly fair (even respectable) recommendation to make. Replacing what Tailscale actually does is not entirely what most Tailscale users want.

If you are the sort of Business Grade™ user who needs access to this tech, Headscale is BSD-licensed and you can make your own solution with little effort. Or you could pay Tailscale for an enterprise license and skip this whole headache from the start.

If you look at Tailscale as a wrapper for Wireguard that sells subnet address space instead of software, it makes a lot more sense. There isn't much for them to open source, really. It's like shaking your fist at Mullvad for not releasing their Terraform scripts and bootstrapping code.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#150

Post by fragmede »

jpeeler wrote: post #82
fragmede wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it "fluff" to you? My definition of "fluff" is that it doesn't answer my question, and that I walk away from it with no idea what the product even is. This is mostly concrete and I can tell you roughly what Narrowlink is and isn't after reading their (misspelled) page. Something like: "Introducing NarrowLink, the world's most advanced and secure VPN solution! With our cutting-edge technology, you'll experi…

Wow, did you use ChatGPT to write that? I actually enjoyed reading it knowing that it was going to be fluff in advance.

Unabashedly so! I'm not in marketing and couldn't have come up with that inside of my allowance of hn time.
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