Comment by 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
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...
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?
Is it on the community, when TS have said that they won't open source their control plane because HS is good enough / easier to run?
it's a proposed and planned feature by the looks of it :
https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/issues/1651
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.
Oh? I thought we added that option on iOS recently. I'll go check.