The clients are. The control server, which is the bit that Tailscale host, is not.
There is an open source alternative called headscale [0]. The main downside is that you'll need to run it.
The closed source centralised control server has other potential issues though, and it ends up being up to the user to decide what's the right balance of security vs convenience.
This is such an outstanding response to the existence of Headscale that I struggle to understand it. Why not just open source Tailscale's control server? Don't get me wrong though, what you guys are doing now is great.
Headscale is the open source central server for tailscale - it implements the same protocols etc and when you use tailscale client with it it only connects to the login server you gave it.
The official reason for why there's no official open source server is that headscale got there first, before tailscale team could (their words, not mine) the unholy mess that was the production server into something people could compile and deploy themselves.
Not really true, tailscale clients do allow you to point to different control servers and open source implementations do exist[1] and are thriving. The clients are also open source and you can even create one yourself if you are willing to.
The thing is, what makes tailscale works really well as a "central" control server is that it makes a lot easier to connect your personal machines. You don't need to deploy your own server, or mess with networking stuff. You just download it, log-in and there you go. I myself have invited some non-tech friends to my network for playing lan games from time time and they find pretty easy to setup tailscale on their side.
There's an alternative to tailscale service called headscale https://github.com/juanfont/headscale (CLI only server compatible with official tailscale clients)
Headscale seems even better! They've taken what tailscale has done and improved it even more by allowing it to be a completely self hosted and private solution.
Headscale seems to implement (almost?) all of the current Tailscale functionality, so I wouldn't be surprised if they added support for this too. They even seem to be friendly with the Tailscale folks.
The tailscale daemon/CLI/client code is already open source and works with the above as the control server.
The tailscale team appear to be encouraging development of headscale too:
"Our opinion is that Headscale provides a valuable complement to Tailscale: It helps personal users better understand both how Tailscale works and how to run a coordination server at home. As such, Tailscale works with Headscale maintainers when making changes to Tailscale clients that might affect how the Headscale coordination server works, to ensure ongoing compatibility."
Personally I find WireGuard and tailscale/headscale to be extremely complementary, and with these you don't cede any control vs running WireGuard on its own.
> Headscale is a self-hostable version of the Tailscale control plane. It's a great project, and it's quite remarkable what they've been able to accomplish through sheer reverse engineering fueled by the boredom that came up at the start of the pandemic
Not to take anything away from the creators of headscale for their excellent work, but I think this doesn't give enough credit to Tailscale. They've gone out of their way to support headscale.
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