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Yeah, tailscale seems to have leadership with their head on right, I agree with the way they handle a lot of things.
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Yeah, this part also stuck out to me:

> Because this wouldn’t be a quick or easy fix, we reached out to the SQLite developers for a professional support contract. This was a great decision. It gave us direct access to their deep expertise and experience, and we had many detailed technical conversations about our architecture and our incidents.

They were willing to pay to get help solving the problem, and then pay again to make sure that the problem is easier to avoid in the future! That kind of long-term thinking seems pretty rare nowadays...

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Probably the most refreshing thing I've read in a while. Glad to support them moving forward if this is indeed their modus operandi.
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Tailscale is the best. It's infinitely better than Hamachi, ZeroTier, etc. My only gripe is that they have some really weird SSO requirements like GitHub, etc. and then that provider becomes a permanent part of your identity.
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I've been a fan of Tailscale since encountering it for the first time at a previous job at a small startup. Someone asked if anyone had a Linux machine when we were all testing out something, and I mentioned I had a personal Linux desktop but wasn't sure how to connect it to the VPN for access, and it turned out that the solution was just literally running two commands in the terminal after installing tailscale from the repos. Compared to my first job where connecting to the VPN from Linux required hours of mucking around with openswan (or was it strongswan? so many swans...) and trial and error with various config files, it was unfathomably straightforward.
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With a desktop its usually possible from the network setting GUI? Worked like that last time I needed to use a VPN for access to a corporate network.
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I think their reasoning on not being an identify provider but acting solely downstream is very clever.
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Y? What's wrong with providing username/password authentication
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You become responsible for keeping those credentials secure, among a whole host of other problems. (Abuse like credential stuffing (more), data breaches (more), account farms (more), and so on.)
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Just FYI - with Tailscale you can switch SSO providers by putting in a support ticket. I did it last year and it was a breeze.
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Oh, thank you! I might do that.
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Yeah, I have my Tailscale tied to my Apple account, which just feels weird. I can add a Passkey account to my Tailnet and make it manager, etc., so that’s what I’ve done. The owner is my Apple account, but I actually do everything admin-wise with a Passkey account.
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Oh I had no idea they supported Apple. Maybe they didn't back when I signed up? I'm seemingly stuck with GitHub forever now though.
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This isn't exactly new; the other model is to just hire them directly. Unfortunately this has not generally led to open source outside of the enterprise world getting similar funding, but it is what it is.
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It's common for databases.

This is Percona's business model. They employ core pg/mysql developers and you can buy a support package from them. Same for enterprisedb. Pretty reasonably priced packages (like maybe $10k-ish/core IIRC) get you 24x7 support. I've only had to escalate issues once but inside 10 hours we got a pg core committer to debug some very strange vacuum behavior.

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Avery is one of the few people I have enough respect for to look up to.
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In real life, an imaginary "leadership" quickly evaporates upon the first hurdle of any kind until proven otherwise by real actions. If I was in your shoes, I would be very careful with blanket statements like these.
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I wish they'd buy the carcass of Keybase from Zoom.

It seems very similar to Tailscale: immense utility from a free-tier product for the general public, which leads to trust and a large enterprise market.

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Their CEO is a very nice and personable guy too. Has given me and others advice on random topics of his interest with no nonsense plenty of times.
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Reading the article, it sounds more like they funded this by buying a SQLite support contract, and the SQLite developers created this in the process of helping them track down the issue.
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That's actually SQLite revenue model.

https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html

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Started using them like 2 weeks back, happy to see how they work.
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