They have gone through the trouble of changing this from a Code of Conduct to a Code of Ethics, for the specific purpose of avoiding quarreling (their rule 66).

You want to move away from SQLite just because you heard some developers are religious.

I really prefer their attitude towards disagreement.

This "Code" isn't saying that this is what the founder believes, and that they would like others to follow it. It's making a pretty unequivocal statement that the founder (and developers) believe that this is the "better" way to live: "Anyone who follows The Rule will live a happier and more productive life"

First of all, this is really unrelated to software or the utility of sqlite. But then we have "The founder of SQLite and all current developers have pledged to follow the spirit of The Rule to the best of their ability. They view The Rule as their promise to all SQLite users of how the developers are expected to behave"

Well then, this is a pretty strong statement of their intention to limit the pool of sqlite contributors to those who follow this rule.

"But sqlite is open source" you might think... but here's what they say:

> SQLite is open-source, meaning that you can make as many copies of it as you want and do whatever you want with those copies, without limitation. But SQLite is not open-contribution. In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and ensure that the code does not become contaminated(!!) with proprietary or licensed content, the project does not accept patches from unknown persons ... > In order to keep SQLite completely free and unencumbered by copyright, the project does not accept patches. If you would like to make a suggested change, and include a patch as a proof-of-concept, that would be great. However please do not be offended if we rewrite your patch from scratch."

So this is all news to me, and I think it's a pretty terrible way to run an open source project, or any project really. I wouldn't work at a company that had this rule. If the rule said "1. Only have sexual relations with people of the opposite sex, in the context of marriage" I suspect many people would wash their hands of it completely.

But really, they've done a great job with sqlite as a piece of software, so kudos to the dogmatic yet exclusive group of authors for their work and dedication. In the meantime, I would be thrilled to see another file-based relational db take its place

1. Someone on the internet has a different opinion than you, therefore they are wrong.

2. Someone on the internet has a closed community (ie codebase that does not accept outside contributions), therefore they are terrible leaders.

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Don't conflate a project's opinions with their technology. Consider this; do you think the team wrote this code of ethics to offend people, or to demonstrate their opinions on certain topics? I do honestly believe that the sqlite team believes these things, and is that wrong that they choose to believe this?

2. Not quite; the community is closed to people who have a different opinion from them. As a software project they're publicly going on record stating that they think their opinion makes them better people, and they don't accept contributions from people outside that community (lesser people). I think in the context of religious beliefs it's a discriminatory stance. If they were an employer in Canada, they would be fined or possibly shut down.

I didn’t read it that way at all. SQLite has been closed-contribution and maintained by a very small group of developers since it’s inception, and I have seen no evidence to suggest that religious beliefs or any supposed self-righteousness plays a part in that. In other words: the community is closed to everyone, not just “to people who have a different opinion from them“. While a closed-contribution model may be uncommon among popular open-source projects, I don’t see a problem with it (no random project on GitHub is obligated to accept my PRs).

The preamble makes it quite clear that agreeing to the code of ethics is absolutely not mandatory within the closed group of contributors to SQLite. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see anything discriminatory about choosing to personally pledge oneself to a specific behavioral standard without placing expectations on others.

I get that viewpoint, but respectfully, I believe differently. What does it really mean to be closed to everyone? And is it really? The source code is in Fossil, and I don't have any experience with this unfortunately, so I couldn't tell you if the author information is preserved, but presumably there is a team contributing to it, and I suspect that team hasn't been 100% the same group of people since inception.

So if a business says 'they're not hiring', and also (supposedly unrelated) that all of the current employees subscribe to this dogmatic code, and then slowly you see people added to the team, but through backchannels, really that's just a way for them to maintain their 'company culture' which, in this case happens to be tied to religious beliefs.

Like I said, I think in Canada the business wouldn't be able to get around discrimination laws by doing this. More likely they'd have to also avoid discussing their religious beliefs publicly.

You also say:

> The preamble makes it quite clear that agreeing to the code of ethics is absolutely not mandatory within the closed group of contributors to SQLite.

but I took a look again, and the closest thing I can find is:

> "individuals" are free to dispute or ignore that advice if they wish.

Yes, individuals can do whatever they want. But

> The founder of SQLite and all current developers have pledged to follow the spirit of The Rule to the best of their ability

To me, it's written between the lines that if you want to penetrate the inner sanctum of core sqlite developers, you'd need to make a really good case for your inclusion on the team in addition to agreeing to this code.

Why?

On another page I find: SQLite Is Public Domain

All of the code and documentation in SQLite has been dedicated to the public domain by the authors. All code authors, and representatives of the companies they work for, have signed affidavits dedicating their contributions to the public domain https://sqlite.org/copyright.html

Given that I'm free to do absolutely whatever I want with the code, why should I be seriously concerned about their code of ethics?