I have the same fears. Last year they have publicly stated they are not interested in acquisition [0]

> Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO).

> “Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pennarun said. “Meanwhile, we have an extremely efficient business model, rapid revenue acceleration, and a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed, which means we can weather all kinds of economic storms.”

Nothing is set in stone, after all it's VC backed. I have a strong aversion to becoming dependent upon proprietary services, however i have chosen to integrate TS into my infrastructure, because the value and simplicity it provides is worth it. I considered the various copy cat services and pure FOSS clones, but TS are the ones who started this space and are the ones continuously innovating in it, I'm onboard with their ethos and mission and have made use of apenwarrs previous work - In other words, they are the experts, they appear to be pretty dedicated to this space, so I'm putting my trust in them... I hope I'm right!

[0] https://betakit.com/corporate-vpn-startup-tailscale-secures-...

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nerdsniper 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Would be curious if a partial decompilation and short static analysis would yield any reliable info about what they might be collecting.

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omnimus 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just note i doubt Tailscale were first popular vpn manager as i remember many hobby users are Zerotier converts and also much older products like Hamachi.

Tailscale have build great product around wireguard (which is quite young) and they have great marketing and docs. But they are hardly first VPN service - they might not even be the most popular one.

	▲	tomxor 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, I ambiguously said "started this space"... and to be honest even in the most generous interpretation that's probably incorrect, maybe ZeroTier started "this space", in that it had NAT busting mesh networking first. As far as I understand Tailscale brought NAT busting mesh networking to wireguard + identity first access control, and reduced configuration complexity. I think they were the first to think about it from an end to end user perspective, and each feature they add definitely has this spin on it. It makes it feel effortless and transparent (in both the networking use sense and cryptography sense)... So i suppose that's what I mean by started, TS was when it first really clicked for a larger group of people, it felt right.
	▲	tietjens an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Might be time to learn me some Wireguard.