The New Internet

An incredibly long ramp up to complaining about centralised control by rent seekers (a very reasonable complaint!) which gets bogged down in some ostensibly unrelated shade about whether client-server computing makes sense (it does) or is itself somehow responsible for the rent seeking (it isn't; you can seek rent on proprietary peer to peer systems as well!) to then arrive at:

> There’s going to be a new world of haves and have-nots. Where in 1970 you had or didn’t have a mainframe, and in 1995 you had or didn’t have the Internet, and today you have or don’t have a TLS cert, tomorrow you’ll have or not have Tailscale. And if you don’t, you won’t be able to run apps that only work in a post-Tailscale world.

The king is dead, long live the king!

"...you can rent seek on proprietary peer to peer systems as well..."

I still use a non-proprietary one that predates Tailscale and that is not OpenVPN. It is small and simple enough even I, a non-programmer, can make modifications.

It's possible one ends up using client-server in order to achieve peer-to-peer because not everyone has an internet-reachable, non-firewalled IP address. Using some hosting company's server to run a "supernode" may be required. No traffic needs to pass through it if it is used only as a "rendezvous server" so the cost can be minimal.

Companies that try to compete with "free" always draw high scrutiny from me. Stop using that free software and start paying us. We added 100 unnecessary "features".

Not doubting this "corporate strategy" can succeed, at least short-term. Look at Slack. But these subscriptions are not for me.

Client-server versus peer-to-peer is misdirection. The real issue is proprietary versus non-proprietary. IMHO.

What is the non-proprietary option you are referring to?