Selfhosted

Not that it is a business but is a specific kind of business. VC funded startups eyeing an IPO more often than not start doing things users are not happy with. Maybe tailscale won't, but might as well be aware what kind of company they are acknowledge there is a decent chance of rugpulls

Yup, I don't know if that is OP's intention, but I would agree myself with the complaint that "Tailscale is a business"

The way I see it, if it's a business it must generate revenue (either now or down the road), and that is enough to have me worried. I do have a Tailscale registration, and the way they approach email communication is already a yellow flag to me (too many ad emails)

That's pretty standard in a business life-cycle, though

I don't know where people ever got the idea that normal = acceptable. I hear this used to justify all sorts of awful crap. It was only ever normalized because users were apathetic.

And what about the Linux Foundation? They are funded through private equity. Should you consider switching away because of that?

Does The Linux Foundation have complete control over Linux?

Simplicity?

NAT punching and proxying when a p2p connection between any 2 nodes cannot be achieved. It’s a world of difference with mobile devices when they always see each other, all the time. However, headscale does all that.

Same thing here, either tailscale selfhosted or Netbird selfhosted I'd the way to go for all the nice features, having the free tier or tailscale for personal data never sounded right to me.

if I setup Headscale on my network, I would have to open a port on my router to connect to it right?

The way I understand it is:

I would have to open a port on my router to connect to it right?

Yes

if I setup Headscale with some cloud provider, could they theoretically go and use the setup to get to my home network?

If they are able to authorize their own node to your Headscale server, then their node gets on your network. If they take over the Headscale node, they might also be able to access your network, either by changing Headscale's config to auth another node or perhaps if the Headscale node is part of the network, which it might be, I don't recall. But I think that's immaterial. If someone takes over the Headscale machine, they can get on your network either way.

I think that's because both work on Android by being a VPN, and the system can't handle doing two vpns simultaneously