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▲ risho 10 days ago

arent most of the the tailscale clients open source aside from the gui portion of the non open source os's?

▲pilif 9 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes they are, unless you're using a mainstream OS and/or want to use a GUI, which is probably the most common use case.

▲__float 9 days ago | parent [-]

While the GUI is somewhat helpful, at the end of the day it's not the key piece, and it could easily be rebuilt.

▲notpushkin 9 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the whole Windows client is closed. On macOS though you can use it from the command line just fine (apart from a couple quirks due to a completely different VPN implementation [1]).

[1]: they have three: https://tailscale.com/kb/1065/macos-variants

▲squiggleblaz 9 days ago | parent [-]

From https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale

"This repository contains the majority of Tailscale's open source code. Notably, it includes the tailscaled daemon and the tailscale CLI tool. The tailscaled daemon runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and to varying degrees on FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The Tailscale iOS and Android apps use this repo's code, but this repo doesn't contain the mobile GUI code."

and

"The macOS, iOS, and Windows clients use the code in this repository but additionally include small GUI wrappers. The GUI wrappers on non-open source platforms are themselves not open source."

Moreover, there's https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-chocolatey to aid the build process. I haven't built it or run it.

On the other hand, while I suppose the Windows app is probably reasonably straightforward to replicate, I guess it would be much harder to produce an iOS or Android app because of the vagaries of mobile programming.

▲pilif 9 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I guess it would be much harder to produce an iOS or Android app because of the vagaries of mobile programming.

on iOS you also need a special entitlement that's only available on specific request and only to known developers, so practically impossible for any open source project to acquire.

▲dcow 9 days ago | parent [-]

This was true in 2015. It is not true anymore.

▲notpushkin 9 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks, I stand corrected then!

Android client is open source (and you can get in from F-Droid, even), so that only leaves iOS I guess.

▲freedomben 9 days ago | parent [-]

Yep, Tailscale takes a pretty reasonable approach to that IMHO. Open source on platforms that are open source. I think that works out pretty well because it meets people where they are. For example the people who care about open source (and thus are running linux or android) get their open source needs met, and people who don't care about open source strongly or at all (as evidenced in part by them running closed/proprietary OSes) such as mac or windows users are also met where they are. Of course this also helps protect their business model because then competitors can't just take the open source versions and run off with them, and the number of linux users is quite small compared to mac and windows so it keeps the majority of the client closed while still providing the openness to those who truly care about it.

*In my perfect world everybody would care about open source, but the evidence is pretty clear that only a tiny minority of people actually do, even among engineers