Wouldn't the point be they're an indecent, possibly bad, actor by default since they're a business at all rather than just creating or contributing to protocols/standards to resolve the issues their product relies on to exist? The only way they could be a good actor is if they're using the money from their sales to fund that initiative with a plan to obsolete themselves.

I suppose if you follow that thread though a lot of businesses just shouldn't exist except for fulfilling the need they fill for the sake of those in need.

Companies are allowed to solve problems for a profit. People can choose to sell their time and energy or give it away. The choice is the default.

In fact, I prefer that capitalist model at this point having seen countless OSS/nonprofit efforts turn into glorified abandonware.

At least the business has an interest in remaining a going concern and maintaining the stack.

BTW the best way to make standards happen is to sell a product based on the standard. Academic standards don't go anywhere.

I have no idea what the adoption is, but this reminds me of the really nice work the buf.build people are doing with ConnectRPC.

I have a SaaS-crush on buf because they did such a good job on fixing such an annoying problem.

> I have no problem criticizing tech companies, but I try to wait until they behave badly.

I'd rather not wait until they have a (quasi-)monopoly on something though. Twitter was great until…

when was twitter ever great? It has been creating echo chambers from day one, and deliberately making discourse difficult and non-nuance. It's arguably the shittiest form of human communication, and that counts facebook also.

> TailScale has been at all times a good actor.

This is the Cloudflare problem all over again. One day Matthew Prince will get hit by a bus, all the "trustworthy people" will leave, a PE firm will take the company private, and merge it with an ad network. Congrats, the entire internet now has a single companies ads all over it and we let it happen because we happened to like the people fucking us.

Matthew Prince is definitely not a good actor, but that's not the point. What Cloudflare did was they acted like good people, said good things, even did some good things, but once they got enough business and momentum, they then started doing shadier and shadier things, and now they're a protection racket that is happy to protect scammers for a fee. I think Cloudflare's most ardent fans would have trouble articulating technically valid reasons for why it makes sense to re-centralize the Internet around them, yet that's exactly what Cloudflare want.

That's why people don't necessarily, and shouldn't, trust that Tailscale won't head down the same path. It's hard enough for non-profits - heck, the Mozilla Foundation is losing all the good will they've ever had, and even the Raspberry Pi Foundation decided to gaslight people when they started eyeing corporate money.

If there's an open source way to do a thing that's a pain in the ass and a way to do the same thing from a for-profit company, I'll take the pain in the ass thing every time. History has shown it to be the prudent thing time and time again.

Check out OpenZiti then - https://openziti.io/. Its Tailscale on steroids, with. (IMHO) a much more scalable implementation of zero trust principles.

Or https://netbird.io which is open-source. You can host the coordination server too :)