Comment by 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.
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.
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...
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.
To clarify, I'm not saying that support contracts are uncommon. I'm saying that going out of their way to then additionally sponsor development of a specific testing tool on top of the support contract is not something I've heard companies do before, and it's pretty awesome!
Probably the most refreshing thing I've read in a while. Glad to support them moving forward if this is indeed their modus operandi.
Tailscale is the best. It's infinitely better than Hamachi, ZeroTier, etc. My only gripe is that they have some really weird SSO requirements like GitHub, etc. and then that provider becomes a permanent part of your identity.
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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.
What other examples of companies paying for something specific to be developed outside of their ongoing paid support contract can you point me to? I'm open to the possibility that this is more common than I realize, but I've yet to hear of another example of sponsoring development separately from support contracts.
They could have just spent $300,000 in tokens to AI slop rewrite SQLite in Rust.
That would be lame. Instead they spent less and improved the world for everyone who used SQLite (which is really a lot of people)
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.
Wow, that’s a great idea! I loved keybase back in the day and really thought it solved a real world problem in a unique and interesting way. Then Zoom bought it (for some reason) and left it to rot.
You might already know and used "for some reason" as sarcasm. For those that do not: Zoom did the usual aqui-hire. They needed to show their enterprise customers they were taking e2e encryption seriously, so they bought out the guys who did exactly that kind of encryption with Keybase.
A shame really, because Keybase was kind of unique in the way the facilitated social proof of identity tied to cryptographic keys. A shame though that they never found a really sustainable business model. When they turned to crypto currency towards the end of their independent run I knew it probably wouldn't last.
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Or instead of buying Keybase, they could fund https://keyoxide.org/?
Why would enterprises need Keybase's product?
We used it for dozens of things back at my old job. Send each other passwords. Informal credentials store fo one off projects and non production. Sensitive project documentation
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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.
Avery is one of the few people I have enough respect for to look up to.
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.
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.
Tailscale is Canadian, headquartered in Toronto.
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.
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?