6 ms·

LibSQL is an open source, open contribution fork of SQLite

38 points by rmason 4y ago

metadat 4y ago
For context, this is a continuation of a story from yesterday: "SQLite: QEMU All over Again?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33081159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33081159 And previous light discussion for this same submission link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33082414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33082414
pexabit 4y ago
That is a lot of effort to complain about SQlite's Code of Conduct.
- anoonmoose 4y ago
  I mean. I was definitely unfamiliar with their "Code of Ethics" [0] until I read it and I cannot say that I'm a tremendous fan. But also, it's the absolute last thing mentioned in the readme, so unless you have additional information that I don't, I don't know why you think that's the main reason they forked, especially when they tell you all the reasons they forked and that isn't really one of them. [0] https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html
  - chasil 4y ago
    It was described yesterday as content extracted from St. Benedict's Rules for Monasteries (which is a much larger book). I read it years ago, but cannot confirm.
  - pexabit 4y ago
    He goes out of his way to mention something peculiar despite its non-relevance to the technical features of the project, and does so again on a Medium post introducing the fork. In fact the only interesting said at all is about the code. (As to DRH's Code of Ethics... well, the product speaks for itself.)
    - threatofrain 4y ago
      The sum of all things speaks for itself. We have an excellent product and a written statement about how all current developers are bound by a religious covenant. And no contributors accepted. If you want to create a fork and welcome lots of contributors, then I don't see how the CoC as written would stand. Of course this has to change. > That is a lot of effort to complain about SQlite's Code of Conduct. Anyways, given that the super-majority of the blog post was about features and the different directions that sqlite is being pulled in, and the only singular mention of the CoC was a paragraph at the very end of the blog, I don't really see the summarization of the blog post as just about the CoC as honest.
  - treis 4y ago
    This is one of those things that's not really a huge in of itself in that it doesn't have much practical implications. But it's such a wildly inappropriate and unprofessional thing to do that it raises questions in my mind about using SqlLite. Which is a pretty impressive thing to do given how good the software is and how widely it's used.
    - haunter 4y ago
      Why is it inappropriate? A lot of OSS projects make political statements all the time, I see no difference at all
      - treis 4y ago
        I dispute that they do but regardless a political statement is not the same thing as a profession of religious tenets.
        freedomben 4y ago
        It's certainly unusual, but all it's saying is that the founder and current dev team hold those religious tenets. It's (explicitly even) not forcing it on others.
        treis 4y ago
        Wearing a polka dot bowtie is unusual. This crosses the line into being inappropriate for a workplace. It should be obvious why, but if not consider a future where the SQLite team needs to replace a member. What's the plan if the best candidate is an Orthodox Jew? Are they going to update the CoE to read: >The founder of SQLite and all current developers, except for Ruth Cohen, have pledged... Even if they're the nicest and most welcoming Christians in the world and will make a better change without hesitation it's still presents a disincentive for non-Christians. There's simply no place for that in any professional setting.
        throwawaywu 4y ago
- kjeetgill 4y ago
  Wow, they took the time to lay out a project roadmap for you and features they're interested in and that's all you took from it? A single, minor mention of it at the end?
  - Kwpolska 4y ago
    The project is a buzzword bingo roadmap (Rust! WASM! io_uring! Distributed databases!), a new CoC and license, and zero new code. No new code means I can’t take it seriously and I doubt they will ever deliver.
- robomartin 4y ago
  > SQlite's Code of Conduct Well, I had never seen that before. As an atheist that was quite a, well, revelation. I am not militant in any way and have a generally lax stance about these things. For example, I have had believer friends ask if they could pray over me when I was going through rough times. My response was "I would be honored". No sense being a complete asshole when someone offers something out of love. The rules page includes this: > No one is required to follow The Rule, to know The Rule, or even to think that The Rule is a good idea. > The Founder of SQLite believes that anyone who follows The Rule will live a happier and more productive life, but individuals are free to dispute or ignore that advice if they wish. In other words, for me, very much my stance with regards to religious belief (or not). It's a "live and let live" position. Something I sometimes feel is sorely needed in today's hatred/outrage-first society.
  - threatofrain 4y ago
    Yes but the sqlite CoC also says that it's a covenant between all current developers and their users, and for any project seeking contributions that's going to make people consider things. If you were a user, then well, you're a user, so enjoy the one-way covenant. But if you're a developer and an atheist as you say, then I don't see how that covenant as worded would stand. I see this as similar to a company that says while all its current employees pledge themselves to a religious covenant, it has never discriminated against anyone on the basis of religious faith; and yet all current employees make that pledge. If in fact the wording on the completeness of the covenant is in error, it should be easy enough to point out a sqlite developer who does not make this pledge.
    - freedomben 4y ago
      > for any project seeking contributions that's going to make people consider things. SQLite isn't and doesn't claim to be seeking contributions, so it seems to me that the existing CoC covers 100% of the surface area. If they started seeking contributions, I would agree that they should consider expanding the CoC. Also, I think it's good to note that the CoC doesn't say that asshole-ish stuff will be tolerated. It's simply quiet on that. I would guess that (much like the vast majority of projects before the Contributor Covenant came about) they would not permit that sort of thing to occur, particularly given the values they've already expressed.
- ploppyploppy 4y ago
  Activist arseholes forcing their "cancel culture" on others if anything remotely related to pro-western ideas of religion or philosophy doesn't bend to their authoritarian whim. I for one think the Code of Conduct in SQLite is excellent.
jbverschoor 4y ago
It's funny how for years SQLite has been moving along constantly, stable, with new features, but all of a sudden when it's popular, people seem to want to have a piece of the credits (looks good on your resume!)
- eatonphil 4y ago
  It was forked by a startup with devs/founders who've worked on QEMU and ScyllaDB, among other things. I don't think they're chasing resume credits. :)
samatman 4y ago
I wish this project all the success, and the responsible parties all the notoriety, which it and they deserve.
- ploppyploppy 4y ago
- chasil 4y ago
  This project cannot have the particular success of maintaining the high quality of code as the parent without obtaining TH3. There is an extensive test suite that SQLite uses, known as "test harness 3" (TH3), that allows them to confirm compliance with the DO-178B avionics standard. Dr. Hipp had previously intended to license TH3. Any startup with goals of maintaining DO-178B quality and compliance should do so. Otherwise, the fork should be regularly rebased to newer branches to regularly pull new SQLite features. TH3 is discussed at some length in this interview: https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/ https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
dman 4y ago
The part about the SQLITE code of conduct at the end is unnecessary imo.
- bitwize 4y ago
  Oh, it's very necessary because it's a significant part of their attempt to align SQLite development with modern open source practices. A code of conduct similar to the Contributor Covenant is table stakes for real-world open source development now. It provides guarantees to contributors and users that community participation will be welcoming and inclusive and harassment will not be tolerated. With so many highly talented developers coming from marginalized backgrounds -- nonwhite, gay, trans, gender-nonconforming, and/or neuroqueer -- not providing these assurances alienates a prime talent pool.
  - AstralStorm 4y ago
    What does that mean, however? How will SQLite enforce good behavior of a developer, in perpetuity? Will it remove code contributed 10 years ago by now an open bigot? Is it pertinent only to communication platforms related directly to SQLite? Would it void and null a safety certification or audit done by such a person? These and other questions come to mind when seeing a CoC of such an undefined form. It is important for the document to answer them. This particular one seems to answer that the CoE is irrelevant to anything as nobody can follow these rules, if read strictly. So why have it at all? The single sentence list can be interpreted in multiple contradictory ways, which is how we got many religions and even monk orders. It is a code of conflict not ethics. Most importantly, I would not sign this, even if I were not an atheist. It is incompatible with rules of modern Catholic Church, Islam and probably more. It is probably not compatible in a strict form with whichever branch of christianity the founder follows as well.
    - pseudalopex 4y ago
      > Will it remove code contributed 10 years ago by now an open bigot? Is this any project's policy? > So why have it at all? The code of ethics explains why they adopted it. Some customers required suppliers have codes of conduct.
Kwpolska 4y ago
This was posted yesterday, complete with an inflammatory blog post. This fork has exactly zero new code, but they already managed to change the license and the code of conduct. Their plans include io_uring, Rust and WASM functions - the first two negate the "single-.c-and-.h multi-platform" paradigm that made SQLite what it is, the third thing seems like a feature very few people would care about. They also want to make SQLite distributed for some reason (uh, just use Postgres?)
- hnov 4y ago
  I think making sqlite distributed-capable is very interesting. Postgres isn't trivially distributed and is a full fledged database server that's not appropriate for scale to zero workloads, though others are working on that as well.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    These do all sound like interesting ideas, but in our current Cambrian explosion of new databases (especially "X open-source SQL database you know and love, but distributed" forks) - you can fork SQLite and build that without being needlessly confrontational about it, or including the language about how they'll rejoin SQLite if their terms are met, which makes me feel like this is a fork about leverage as much as realizing a different vision for a database.
    - hnov 4y ago
      I imagine they love the sqlite codebase but are not ecstatic about having to maintain a fork and would like to have sqlite upstream their changes such that they don't have to import patches in perpetuity. This is a valid frustration that most commonly happens with OSS that's built by a corporation and thrown over the wall. I think in this case the dig at the end of the README is a way to be like "look at those religious cult members, closed off from accepting contributions" which is a cheap shot but all's fair in politics. A lot of companies build on top Linux, PG and others and are able to reach consensus with the community.
- eatonphil 4y ago
endisneigh 4y ago
These threads are a great example of the problem with open source. People will complain no matter what. Even if there’s no new code, one could say being on GitHub and being able to track the changes are worth it alone, but alas. If it works out, great, if not, we’ll SQLite isn’t going anywhere.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > These threads are a great example of the problem with open source. People will complain no matter what. But this is true of non-open-source projects/products as well, and also everything.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > These threads are a great example of the problem with open source. People will complain no matter what. Who cares if people complain? If you're writing open source software because you want a hugbox to heap you with unearned adoration, you've made a big mistake. Respect is earned in this field, that's the way it should be. There are no participation trophies; make something good if you want people to thank you for it.
rwbt 4y ago
I wish this project good luck but I'm glad how SQLite team kinda does it's own thing like using Fossil for development instead of Github, not accepting outside contributions, very different code of ethics document etc.
tnboks 4y ago
haunter 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
the_third_wave 4y ago
> We take our code of conduct seriously, and unlike SQLite, we do not substitute it with an unclear alternative. We strive to foster a community that values diversity, equity, and inclusion. We encourage others to speak up if they feel uncomfortable. No, you don't. You strive to foster an ideologically homogeneous "community" where the language police has a virtual "license to kill". I much prefer the SQLite "code of conduct" [1] which at least allows dissent without being shot down due to an accusation of -ism or -phobia. [1] https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html
rroot 4y ago
It's quite an achievement to create such a toxic fork that it's announcement gets flagged on HN.

38 points by rmason 4y ago

For context, this is a continuation of a story from yesterday: "SQLite: QEMU All over Again?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33081159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33081159 And previous light discussion for this same submission link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33082414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33082414

pexabit 4y ago

That is a lot of effort to complain about SQlite's Code of Conduct.

anoonmoose 4y ago
I mean. I was definitely unfamiliar with their "Code of Ethics" [0] until I read it and I cannot say that I'm a tremendous fan. But also, it's the absolute last thing mentioned in the readme, so unless you have additional information that I don't, I don't know why you think that's the main reason they forked, especially when they tell you all the reasons they forked and that isn't really one of them. [0] https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html
- chasil 4y ago
  It was described yesterday as content extracted from St. Benedict's Rules for Monasteries (which is a much larger book). I read it years ago, but cannot confirm.
- pexabit 4y ago
  He goes out of his way to mention something peculiar despite its non-relevance to the technical features of the project, and does so again on a Medium post introducing the fork. In fact the only interesting said at all is about the code. (As to DRH's Code of Ethics... well, the product speaks for itself.)
  - threatofrain 4y ago
    The sum of all things speaks for itself. We have an excellent product and a written statement about how all current developers are bound by a religious covenant. And no contributors accepted. If you want to create a fork and welcome lots of contributors, then I don't see how the CoC as written would stand. Of course this has to change. > That is a lot of effort to complain about SQlite's Code of Conduct. Anyways, given that the super-majority of the blog post was about features and the different directions that sqlite is being pulled in, and the only singular mention of the CoC was a paragraph at the very end of the blog, I don't really see the summarization of the blog post as just about the CoC as honest.
- treis 4y ago
  This is one of those things that's not really a huge in of itself in that it doesn't have much practical implications. But it's such a wildly inappropriate and unprofessional thing to do that it raises questions in my mind about using SqlLite. Which is a pretty impressive thing to do given how good the software is and how widely it's used.
  - haunter 4y ago
    Why is it inappropriate? A lot of OSS projects make political statements all the time, I see no difference at all
    - treis 4y ago
      I dispute that they do but regardless a political statement is not the same thing as a profession of religious tenets.
      - freedomben 4y ago
        It's certainly unusual, but all it's saying is that the founder and current dev team hold those religious tenets. It's (explicitly even) not forcing it on others.
        treis 4y ago
        Wearing a polka dot bowtie is unusual. This crosses the line into being inappropriate for a workplace. It should be obvious why, but if not consider a future where the SQLite team needs to replace a member. What's the plan if the best candidate is an Orthodox Jew? Are they going to update the CoE to read: >The founder of SQLite and all current developers, except for Ruth Cohen, have pledged... Even if they're the nicest and most welcoming Christians in the world and will make a better change without hesitation it's still presents a disincentive for non-Christians. There's simply no place for that in any professional setting.
        throwawaywu 4y ago
kjeetgill 4y ago
Wow, they took the time to lay out a project roadmap for you and features they're interested in and that's all you took from it? A single, minor mention of it at the end?
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  The project is a buzzword bingo roadmap (Rust! WASM! io_uring! Distributed databases!), a new CoC and license, and zero new code. No new code means I can’t take it seriously and I doubt they will ever deliver.
robomartin 4y ago
> SQlite's Code of Conduct Well, I had never seen that before. As an atheist that was quite a, well, revelation. I am not militant in any way and have a generally lax stance about these things. For example, I have had believer friends ask if they could pray over me when I was going through rough times. My response was "I would be honored". No sense being a complete asshole when someone offers something out of love. The rules page includes this: > No one is required to follow The Rule, to know The Rule, or even to think that The Rule is a good idea. > The Founder of SQLite believes that anyone who follows The Rule will live a happier and more productive life, but individuals are free to dispute or ignore that advice if they wish. In other words, for me, very much my stance with regards to religious belief (or not). It's a "live and let live" position. Something I sometimes feel is sorely needed in today's hatred/outrage-first society.
- threatofrain 4y ago
  Yes but the sqlite CoC also says that it's a covenant between all current developers and their users, and for any project seeking contributions that's going to make people consider things. If you were a user, then well, you're a user, so enjoy the one-way covenant. But if you're a developer and an atheist as you say, then I don't see how that covenant as worded would stand. I see this as similar to a company that says while all its current employees pledge themselves to a religious covenant, it has never discriminated against anyone on the basis of religious faith; and yet all current employees make that pledge. If in fact the wording on the completeness of the covenant is in error, it should be easy enough to point out a sqlite developer who does not make this pledge.
  - freedomben 4y ago
    > for any project seeking contributions that's going to make people consider things. SQLite isn't and doesn't claim to be seeking contributions, so it seems to me that the existing CoC covers 100% of the surface area. If they started seeking contributions, I would agree that they should consider expanding the CoC. Also, I think it's good to note that the CoC doesn't say that asshole-ish stuff will be tolerated. It's simply quiet on that. I would guess that (much like the vast majority of projects before the Contributor Covenant came about) they would not permit that sort of thing to occur, particularly given the values they've already expressed.
ploppyploppy 4y ago
Activist arseholes forcing their "cancel culture" on others if anything remotely related to pro-western ideas of religion or philosophy doesn't bend to their authoritarian whim. I for one think the Code of Conduct in SQLite is excellent.

jbverschoor 4y ago

It's funny how for years SQLite has been moving along constantly, stable, with new features, but all of a sudden when it's popular, people seem to want to have a piece of the credits (looks good on your resume!)

eatonphil 4y ago
It was forked by a startup with devs/founders who've worked on QEMU and ScyllaDB, among other things. I don't think they're chasing resume credits. :)

samatman 4y ago

I wish this project all the success, and the responsible parties all the notoriety, which it and they deserve.

ploppyploppy 4y ago
chasil 4y ago
This project cannot have the particular success of maintaining the high quality of code as the parent without obtaining TH3. There is an extensive test suite that SQLite uses, known as "test harness 3" (TH3), that allows them to confirm compliance with the DO-178B avionics standard. Dr. Hipp had previously intended to license TH3. Any startup with goals of maintaining DO-178B quality and compliance should do so. Otherwise, the fork should be regularly rebased to newer branches to regularly pull new SQLite features. TH3 is discussed at some length in this interview: https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/ https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

dman 4y ago

The part about the SQLITE code of conduct at the end is unnecessary imo.

bitwize 4y ago
Oh, it's very necessary because it's a significant part of their attempt to align SQLite development with modern open source practices. A code of conduct similar to the Contributor Covenant is table stakes for real-world open source development now. It provides guarantees to contributors and users that community participation will be welcoming and inclusive and harassment will not be tolerated. With so many highly talented developers coming from marginalized backgrounds -- nonwhite, gay, trans, gender-nonconforming, and/or neuroqueer -- not providing these assurances alienates a prime talent pool.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  What does that mean, however? How will SQLite enforce good behavior of a developer, in perpetuity? Will it remove code contributed 10 years ago by now an open bigot? Is it pertinent only to communication platforms related directly to SQLite? Would it void and null a safety certification or audit done by such a person? These and other questions come to mind when seeing a CoC of such an undefined form. It is important for the document to answer them. This particular one seems to answer that the CoE is irrelevant to anything as nobody can follow these rules, if read strictly. So why have it at all? The single sentence list can be interpreted in multiple contradictory ways, which is how we got many religions and even monk orders. It is a code of conflict not ethics. Most importantly, I would not sign this, even if I were not an atheist. It is incompatible with rules of modern Catholic Church, Islam and probably more. It is probably not compatible in a strict form with whichever branch of christianity the founder follows as well.
  - pseudalopex 4y ago
    > Will it remove code contributed 10 years ago by now an open bigot? Is this any project's policy? > So why have it at all? The code of ethics explains why they adopted it. Some customers required suppliers have codes of conduct.

Kwpolska 4y ago

This was posted yesterday, complete with an inflammatory blog post. This fork has exactly zero new code, but they already managed to change the license and the code of conduct. Their plans include io_uring, Rust and WASM functions - the first two negate the "single-.c-and-.h multi-platform" paradigm that made SQLite what it is, the third thing seems like a feature very few people would care about. They also want to make SQLite distributed for some reason (uh, just use Postgres?)

hnov 4y ago
I think making sqlite distributed-capable is very interesting. Postgres isn't trivially distributed and is a full fledged database server that's not appropriate for scale to zero workloads, though others are working on that as well.
- maxbond 4y ago
  These do all sound like interesting ideas, but in our current Cambrian explosion of new databases (especially "X open-source SQL database you know and love, but distributed" forks) - you can fork SQLite and build that without being needlessly confrontational about it, or including the language about how they'll rejoin SQLite if their terms are met, which makes me feel like this is a fork about leverage as much as realizing a different vision for a database.
  - hnov 4y ago
    I imagine they love the sqlite codebase but are not ecstatic about having to maintain a fork and would like to have sqlite upstream their changes such that they don't have to import patches in perpetuity. This is a valid frustration that most commonly happens with OSS that's built by a corporation and thrown over the wall. I think in this case the dig at the end of the README is a way to be like "look at those religious cult members, closed off from accepting contributions" which is a cheap shot but all's fair in politics. A lot of companies build on top Linux, PG and others and are able to reach consensus with the community.
eatonphil 4y ago

endisneigh 4y ago

These threads are a great example of the problem with open source. People will complain no matter what. Even if there’s no new code, one could say being on GitHub and being able to track the changes are worth it alone, but alas. If it works out, great, if not, we’ll SQLite isn’t going anywhere.

CharlesW 4y ago
> These threads are a great example of the problem with open source. People will complain no matter what. But this is true of non-open-source projects/products as well, and also everything.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
> These threads are a great example of the problem with open source. People will complain no matter what. Who cares if people complain? If you're writing open source software because you want a hugbox to heap you with unearned adoration, you've made a big mistake. Respect is earned in this field, that's the way it should be. There are no participation trophies; make something good if you want people to thank you for it.

rwbt 4y ago

I wish this project good luck but I'm glad how SQLite team kinda does it's own thing like using Fossil for development instead of Github, not accepting outside contributions, very different code of ethics document etc.

tnboks 4y ago

haunter 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

the_third_wave 4y ago

> We take our code of conduct seriously, and unlike SQLite, we do not substitute it with an unclear alternative. We strive to foster a community that values diversity, equity, and inclusion. We encourage others to speak up if they feel uncomfortable. No, you don't. You strive to foster an ideologically homogeneous "community" where the language police has a virtual "license to kill". I much prefer the SQLite "code of conduct" [1] which at least allows dissent without being shot down due to an accusation of -ism or -phobia. [1] https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html

rroot 4y ago

It's quite an achievement to create such a toxic fork that it's announcement gets flagged on HN.