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Comment by simonw

15 days 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.

61 comments

simonw

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buggymcbugfix  14 days ago

Not 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

  • chillaranand  14 days ago

    Important 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-netbir...

    • miki123211  14 days ago

      Is this because HS hasn't implemented it yet (which is on the community), or because Tailscale does something to prevent them from working specifically?

      2 replies →

  • xyst  14 days ago

    The 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.

binhex  15 days ago

Yeah, tailscale seems to have leadership with their head on right, I agree with the way they handle a lot of things.

  • saghm  15 days ago

    Yeah, 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...

    • x0x0  15 days ago

      It'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.

      1 reply →

    • throwaway27448  15 days ago

      This 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.

      1 reply →

  • AtlasBarfed  15 days ago

    I 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.

  • devmor  15 days ago

    Their 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.

  • packetlost  15 days ago

    Avery is one of the few people I have enough respect for to look up to.

    • rcleveng  14 days ago

      Avery 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.

  • xyst  14 days ago

    At 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.

  • garganzol  15 days ago

    In 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  14 days ago

      This 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?

gavinsyancey  15 days ago

Reading 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.