AFAIK, Zerotier is about equally proprietary, more-free (as in beer), and has been doing the node-to-node mesh thing instead of spoke-and-hub longer than Tailscale has been in existence.
And if I remember correctly, ZT was initially created to provide something like this "New Internet" concept that Tailscale has apparently recently discovered, except they called it "Earth" and abandoned it in 2023.
Tailscale does p2p, not hub-spoke, with additional DERP system which combines various NAT bypasses with worst case hair pinning over HTTPS - you can host all components yourself.
Kinda? It works great in practice. You can run your own controllers if you want which completely disconnects you from the proprietary service. But the code is BSL.
I didn't mean to suggest it doesn't work well, as I said I've not used it.
It's still proprietary if you self-host it, I was thinking in particular that tailscale uses Wireguard and Zerotier uses something custom, i.e. proprietary. Note that the context was:
> The internet succeeded because it was built on standards and was completely free. With Tailscale, I get wireguard is open source and we have things like Headscale. But [...]
to which the commenter I replied to asked of alternatives. So I wasn't saying tailscale great and open and standards compliant, and Zerotier not; I was saying it's the obvious competitor but if that's your problem with tailscale then it's if anything worse in that regard.
