alt Hacker News>"like netcat, but over Tailscale's data plane"
Half of the Software offering nowadays seems to be selling vendor lock-in at no added value and then making a profit.
Sure there's always some negligible added value, and then they reinvent a whole stack for their ecosystem. In the case of tailscale the added value seems to be avoiding going into your router and activating port forwarding? It looks like negative added value to me. Someone that tells you "don't do NAT traversal, just open a port" would be highly valuable, but saying no doesn't seem to be trendy, and is certainly not an easy sell.
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> In the case of tailscale the added value seems to be avoiding going into your router and activating port forwarding?
Well, ignoring the tone... kinda yeah? I mean, if port forwarding works for you, and you have public IPv4, and you have no CGNAT, and you need a connection only between 2 hosts, then port forwarding is actually a half-decent idea. However, it's not what Tailscale excels at.
...this is a github repo. Pointing to an open source project. That is not forced to use any vendor-specific systems to function.
(Author here)
There's no vendor lock-in here and no payment or account required. If Tailscale as a company fails, tailcat keeps working if you run your own DERP server. It's just open source code, not a hosted service.