> I mean, please read this in its entirety. They even have a "Encouraging Headscale" section.

Honestly that makes it even weirder.

Usually companies will just not acknowledge that an open alternative that plugs into their existing product exists, and if they do it's for enforcement/diverting purposes ("Don't use this, please stick to the official stuff")

If you're at a point where you acknowledge, accept, and even help the unofficial FOSS alternative, why not make your official stuff the same way?

Product differentiation. If you run the head scale server, I’m not certain the funnel service will work. And there’s probably other stuff that is not planned to work with the FOSS coordinator server. And of course, one of the big things is: they don’t have to support anything with headscale, even if it’s sort of their software. Use the official stuff, and you get support. Pay, and you get better support.

For that matter one can use Windows’s built-in WSL or Hyper-V functionality to run the Linux tailscale client, too.

In fact, I do this anyway because their Windows client’s subnet router functionality is documented as being less performant than their FOSS client. I use my home desktop running Windows as a subnet router from tailscale into my home network, but when I read the note about performance I quickly installed Alpine Linux on a Hyper-V virtual machine and installed tailscale on there.

That simple Alpine VM takes up so little resources that I don’t even notice any impact on performance with my 2009 12 core Xeon system. (This was a huge system, but I would imagine a modern low-midrange CPU would easily outperform it and likewise handle a micro-VM just as well)

One static route added to my home router, and traffic flows both directions just fine. No need to install the client on any more machines on my network. This also saves on licensing, helping me stay within my free plan. :)