TailScale is wonderful but they do need competition. I imagine an IPO is on the horizon, and as soon as they enter that phase, nasty price increases are sure to follow unless someone else is nipping hard at their heels.
The individual working on headscale also works for tailscale. And being quite stable and prod ready, even if they pull the plug, a community fork would still keep it alive, given majority of essential features are already there
The problem is, commercial services will always enshittify. It's inevitable. Even when they conquer the whole market (see Netflix) they will want to see a rising line in profits so then they will turn the thumbscrews on the customers.
It’s especially when they conquer the whole market. It’s why investors favor growth and adoption, even at a loss, until it’s won the market and can turn up the monetization dial.
All the streaming services are enshittifying, even the smaller ones. And other smaller webshops are enshittifying the same way that Amazon does. Like Cory Doctorow described, there's a few big webshops in the Netherlands like bol.com and coolblue.com and they are now also allowing third party sellers, often even from China. The webshops are absolved of all responsibility but they do cash out on every transaction.
Sorry no. A stable organization with a good profit margin is enough to take care of employees and pay their salaries. Boundless growth which is what enshittification is associated with, is driven by money-hungry stakeholders and “investors” that demand an ever growing return on investment - they don’t settle for speed, they need constant acceleration.
A lot of employees at successful startups & FAANG make most of their money from the stock, no? And they need to buy houses and send their kids to fancy schools too, no? So sure, we can reduce it to stock holders, but I’d bet dollars to donuts the 90% of employees who aren’t posting on hn are at least passively ok with “improving metrics”, and some ambitious ones are driving the enshittification initiatives hard.
IMO the reason devs started being paid in stock in the first place is VC-style grow at all costs mentality. The fundraising economy didn’t work without fabricating compensation and only paying out on hits.
No other industry operates with such a blurred distinction between employees and owners. Well, save for the gig economy, itself a tumor on American-style big tech.
Personally I'd be much happier with a stable income with not much upward mobility but also not much risk of falling downwards. Which is what Europe is geared more towards. I don't constantly want to be in a race. Just to live my life.
If they employees want it, fine but don't be surprised if we customers start finding alternatives. And/or pirating their content (e.g. when it comes to streaming services).
But yeah American companies aren't there to support the employees. The only one they answer to are the owners or large shareholders (whichevery applies), and their only goal is to make those richer. Customers and employees alike are nothing but consumables, a raw resource you only treat right if you can't avoid it.
They're fine with it now. They won't be, when the next potential revenue source on their list is to crack down on it.
Remember, revenue must always increase, and must always increase faster than the year before (and this is more important than keeping the company alive), so companies always try increasingly desperate measures. Right now they are nowhere near the point of that particular measure. But they will be in the future.
Yeah, I chose ZeroTier over Tailscale early on. Zero regrets, it’s nearly perfect for my use-case (remote monitoring and management of highly diverse systems and environments).
I mean the fact headscale exists and is still in decent development, means i doubt it really is an issue, what i'd like to see is an effort for an opensource tailscale client so we could use headscale without the closed source client.
