This. The public domain thing is a red herring not worthy of the attention it's gotten, but the infeasibility of making contributions is very much worth talkin

This. The public domain thing is a red herring not worthy of the attention it's gotten, but the infeasibility of making contributions is very much worth talking about. Basically, Richard Hipp is an open source business genius. He made an exceedingly popular open source thing. Then he found a way to make it so no one would bother using any forks. Then he created a consortium that pays for development and upkeep. The secret to that success is the proprietary test suite and their refusal to accept contributions. Anyone wanting to fork the code base will not be able to recreate that test suite, nor the upkeep, therefore they won't be anywhere near as trusted as the SQLite dev team.