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Comment by dblohm7 | Hacker News Reader

(Tailscalar here) To be clear: it's only the GUIs that are closed source on selected platforms.

Thats actually a good way to split a project up into closed/open imho. Open the functional part so people can see you're not sending data to hq behind their backs and make the boring time consuming ui closed. I like it. Then make money out of a service rather than the software. As we all know, tech people will see a piece if challenging software and go out of their way to replicate it and release it for free, for whatever reasons. So open sourcing that part takes the challenge away.

I stand corrected.

Although, the problem is not so single-layered. Do I understand the situation correctly, in case of iOS, to not be subject to additional limitations of the platform that restricts the distribution of your products to the extents that the laws of the countries where your business is registered require, all the user has to do is to fork the main repo (which is, thankfully, BSD), build a minimally acceptable GUI, pass Apple certification, publish the app in the app store, and Bob's your uncle?

Essentially, yeah, but of course you wouldn't want to use any Tailscale trademarks.

Tailscale is engineered under the assumption that any client connected to our control plane could potentially differ from our canonical OSS codebase.

That's good to know. Can you point me to the peer relay code? I'd like to look at what and how it works. thanks!

can you say more about this. I've been considering adding tailscale to some products but if my (nerd) perspective is to survive corporate realism I need more than a 1-liner to justify. seriously curious. Also how would I pitch it to a EU based crowd that wants increasingly less to do with US based tech?

For one, Tailscale is a Canadian company :)

Essentially this: OSS operating systems get OSS GUIs.

Does that include android?

https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-android

Nice, thanks.

Being open source means very little when they won't merge PRs, like this one to support disabling streaming one's network behavior to ` log.tailscale.com`: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-android/pull/695

Let's stop moving the goalposts. Open source has a specific definition, and "they merge whatever code I want them to" isn't part of it. Just fork the client, compile it, and run it yourself.

An option to disable telemetry is important.

It's not "whartever code".

You're welcome to fork it

No, thanks. I'll just use the competitors without telemetry.

Heh, that's my PR. Initially I thought it would be a trivial change, but then I realized I hadn't considered how it should interact with MDM / device posture functionality - these aren't features I'm personally using with the Android client, but are understandably important to enterprises.

I still hope to get back to that and try to get it to a state where it can be merged, but I need to figure out how to test the MDM parts of it properly, and ideally get a bit of guidance from the tailscale team on how it should work/is my implementation on the right track (think I had some open questions around the UI as well)

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