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by serf 47 days ago
tailscale syndrome.

"we want to be infrastructure for people, and a business towards professionals."

stuck between "we need cash to operate" and "we want to be a public good infrastructural system." , with the negative parts of a for-profit whisked away with "Well it's open source."

it's a business concept i'm okayish with as long as the "Well it's open source." caveat doesn't come with a total bespoke and unusable code base to figure out.
3 comments
rklaehn 47 days ago
Take a look yourself.

Our code is as good as we can make it, and everything is modular and well documented. For example our QUIC implementation noq which underlies every iroh connection can also be used as a standalone QUIC impl that implements QUIC multipath.

https://docs.rs/noq/latest/noq/

If we wanted to have "total bespoke and unusable code" we would have inlined all of this into the iroh repo to make it unusable.

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colinmarc 47 days ago
Not affiliated, but I am a very happy user of Tailscale and a very happy user of Iroh; we use the latter in production at work.

Tailscale is a great service that happens to be open source, but Iroh is clearly structured as a library that you can build into whatever you want.

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PLG88 47 days ago
fwiw, Tailscale happens to be mostly open source, not completely. Yes, I know Headscale exists, it does not implement all the Tailscale functions (not non-functional production type capabilities)
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w4der 47 days ago
RustDesk has a similar business model and works fine for what it is, is there something particular about TailScale and Iroh that makes you think it will not work?
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