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One of the notable aspects of SQLite as a open source project is being open source but not open-contribution. drh put it in public domain, and doesn’t accept ou
by oefrha 6y ago
One of the notable aspects of SQLite as a open source project is being open source but not open-contribution. drh put it in public domain, and doesn’t accept outside contributions to prevent it from being contaminated in any way. In an open source landscape where bazaar seems to have mostly won, SQLite remains one of the (last?) cathedral strongholds, and serves as a good reminder to aggressive contributors that open source maintainers don’t have to accept or even consider their PRs.
https://sqlite.org/copyright.html https://sqlite.org/copyright.html
- sjwright 6y agoHas there been much agitation for (or serious attempts at) forking SQLite? That's probably the real test of the stewardship of an open source project.
- justinclift 6y agoNothing springs to mind, as of yet. However, with the very latest release series (3.32.x), one of the pieces ("SQLITE_HAS_CODEC") used by third party encryption libraries (eg SQLCipher, various others) was removed without notice. https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/a48e4672da https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/a48e4672da There does seem to be a way forward, via reimplementing the encryption as a SQLite VFS. If that didn't exist though, then some kind of forking would be on the cards.
- iveqy 6y agoI believe it's the same with lua
- Cyph0n 6y agoTurns out the company that employs all SQLite devs is based in NC! I wonder if the devs are based here, too.
- asveikau 6y agoThe primary author is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._Richard_Hipp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._Richard_Hipp If you hear him on a podcast or speaking engagement he's also got the accent to match.
- mrweasel 6y agoAs I understand the reason is that you can pay for a commercial licens to SQLite, meaning DRH has to keep track of contributer agreement. Having signed contributer agreement for any minor PR would be a major hassel. Edit: well apparently that basically the text you linked to.
- oefrha 6y agoIf you contribute to any open contribution project by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. you’ll have to sign a CLA first, however minor the PR is. Same goes for some non-corporate projects, e.g. CPython. There are readily made forms and enforcement bots for CLAs at least within the GitHub ecosystem, so you can even deploy them to your one man project within an hour; it’s also not hard to write the tools from scratch, especially considering that drh wrote his own SCM. Therefore, keeping track of CLAs is pretty far down the list of reasons not being open contribution, if it is on the list at all.