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I've always been on the outside looking in, so I've never used Tailscale or its open-source brethren.

Would this service be comparable to Headscale[0]?

[0] https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

Headscale is server only. Netbird is the whole stack (basically does the same thing but completely different software/implementation)

But the tailscale client is open source too

Doesn't that also then make tailscale completely open source?

What? The original coordination server, which is not running headscale, is closed source so yes, they are still a closed source company

No their "real" backend is proprietary. Headscale is a separate implementation that they also maintain. It's intended for self-hosting your individual Tailnet. I'm assuming if you tried to use it as a corporate VPN you would run into limitations.

Their clients for proprietary OSs are at least partly proprietary too.

To be honest I find this all a very reasonable set of compromises. It means I'm comfortable using their proprietary service without feeling like I'm getting locked into a completely closed ecosystem.

Not on Windows and iOS. And on the mac, the most useable client isn’t open source either.

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