Headscale & Tailscale: The complementary open source clone

<p>Headscale began as a learning project to work out “what was needed” to re-implement a Tailscale control server and unexpectedly exploded in popularity in the self-hosted and open source community as a home-labbers alternative to Tailscale. </p> <p>Headscale has a vibrant community, about 6000 members in our Discord community and our Github repo has more stars than Tailscale’s open source client, but who's counting. </p> <p>Three years ago I was hired as a member of technical staff at Tailscale, spending half of my time contributing and driving Headscale, ensuring the future of the project. </p> <p>Headscale is a clone of Tailscale’s closed-source SaaS control plane, and it would be easy to consider it a competitor. Tailscale supporting Headscale this way is an unusual arrangement and sometimes raises eyebrows with "the internet". </p> <p>It turns out that letting Headscale be autonomous and trusting it to run its own community complements Tailscale in a variety of ways. It helps people stay in the ecosystem. Homelabbers and self-hosted will use it at home, but bring Tailscale to work. Sometimes it even solves problems Tailscale can not.</p> <p>Of course, it has not only been smooth sailing, and being a paid contributor has caused a lot of skepticism with some users fearing an “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy, fueling conspiracy theories about our roadmap.</p> <p>In this talk, I will share how the projects exist in symbiosis, the challenges of being a paid contributor, and how the stability of a corporate payroll has enabled Headscale to reach its current scale.</p>