[_kocq]

ZeroTier was arguably the pioneer in this market, but aside from being too early, their product was not nearly as polished or fast. Their clients are also closed source and they actively went after third party coordination servers, wherenas I hear headscale mentioned by tailscale employees all the time.

Tailscale goes for adoption by convincing enthusiasts that might also be decision makers.

ZeroTier thought it could just survive on its own merit, in a time where "Zero Trust" as a concept was almost entirely unknown.

[api]

> they actively went after third party coordination servers, wherenas I hear headscale mentioned by tailscale employees all the time.

ZeroTier founder here. We never did anything remotely like that, so I'm curious about where in the world you heard that. Is someone out there saying that?

We regularly tell people about FOSS stuff like this:

https://github.com/key-networks/ztncui

We did adopt an AGPL or SSPL style licensing strategy a while back to discourage closed for-profit attempts to basically expropriate the product. We are considering going back to a more liberal license in the future since that issue seems to have lessened. But we never had any issue with FOSS or not-for-profit stuff using ZeroTier.

[password4321]

> they actively went after third party coordination servers

Can you point me to more information about this? According to my limited understanding, the ZeroTier coordination server is open source.