I caught this discussion on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/rcvih1/you_should_know_about_using_zerotier_or_tailscale/hnx8v1f (/r/selfhosted is a community of 150k techies that like to run/host their own software instead of relying on cloud services)
I learned one surprising thing, that ZeroTier is not truly self-hostable. And I quote your own docs linked in the discussion above: “You can host your own roots in addition to ZeroTier’s, but you can’t not use ZeroTier’s (unless your are a Very Large Enterprise Customer).”
If people can’t keep using older versions of ZeroTier running on their own servers the day ZeroTier Inc Ltd decides to go closed-source, or goes bankrupt, then what’s the point of any of it being open-source? OK, the open-source client allow people to independently audit the zero-trust encryption, but that’s the only benefit, isn’t it? Everything else might as well be closed-source.
Why don’t you allow everything to be self-hostable without ZeroTier Inc Ltd having a killswitch in their hands? I realize open-source might mean different things to different people, but I think it’s fair to say the common definition of the word is one that gives the user the freedom to run the program forever (within the terms of the license). I think it’s dishonest to call ZeroTier open-source, it would be more accurate to say “proprietary tech with some components open-sourced that can’t function without the core closed-source ones, which can be turned off at any time”.
Do you have any plans to change this?