I don't think it is possible to Open Source the entirety of Tailscale, is what I'm saying. Their product is deeply intertwined with system providers, autoscalers and load balancers.
There's a world in which they "open source" Tailscale in the form of a massive K8s spec, which costs ~$400/day to operate for a single user. But... nobody would really use it. If Headscale offers most of the features with much less overhead/configuration, it's a perfectly fair (even respectable) recommendation to make. Replacing what Tailscale actually does is not entirely what most Tailscale users want.
If you are the sort of Business Grade™ user who needs access to this tech, Headscale is BSD-licensed and you can make your own solution with little effort. Or you could pay Tailscale for an enterprise license and skip this whole headache from the start.
If you look at Tailscale as a wrapper for Wireguard that sells subnet address space instead of software, it makes a lot more sense. There isn't much for them to open source, really. It's like shaking your fist at Mullvad for not releasing their Terraform scripts and bootstrapping code.
I believe the best approach is to have a completely open source core product which its own API. You can then have a propriatery multi-tenant platform (incl. hosting, mngt, patching, support, 3rd party integrations etc) which interacts with the open source API. This provides the best of both worlds.
fwiw, I work for a company with both an open source and proprietary product and this is how we do it.
There's a world in which they "open source" Tailscale in the form of a massive K8s spec, which costs ~$400/day to operate for a single user. But... nobody would really use it. If Headscale offers most of the features with much less overhead/configuration, it's a perfectly fair (even respectable) recommendation to make. Replacing what Tailscale actually does is not entirely what most Tailscale users want.
If you are the sort of Business Grade™ user who needs access to this tech, Headscale is BSD-licensed and you can make your own solution with little effort. Or you could pay Tailscale for an enterprise license and skip this whole headache from the start.
If you look at Tailscale as a wrapper for Wireguard that sells subnet address space instead of software, it makes a lot more sense. There isn't much for them to open source, really. It's like shaking your fist at Mullvad for not releasing their Terraform scripts and bootstrapping code.