Also, they're building a project that's more open to outsiders.
54min in was what I was thinking of.
“Lots of people have tried, you’re welcome to try”
I apologize if I gave a bad gloss, but I think it was roughly in the spirit of what you said.
Q: If a young developer said they wanted to fork SQLite and build something better, what would you tell them?
A: ... lots of people have tried. You're welcome to try. I think that the time has passed; it takes twenty five years, and it takes maniacal devotion to the cause.
Sqlite is excellent but I still have many gripes with it, especially around defaults.
The purpose of SQLite's governance model is to be a cult, that only accepts members who share the same religion.
The software happens to be good. Getting it away from that governance and turning it into an open community sounds great. And that can happen while still maintaining high standards.
Can you explain your view more? Otherwise, this sounds like a motte-and-bailey game.
They are, of course, free to do so; freedom of association is their right. Others are free to judge them for it, and to question whether they should be using the resulting software. The license is open, the community is not. So, seeing a project come along that looks to build something more open (and it's really saying something when "project whose governance is owned by a company, but open to pull requests" is more open) seems like a positive step.
(Also, as a database project, surely they shouldn't be mixing church and state. ;) )
That's basically the opposite of any other project where you pay to get support and a certified official build of the exact same code as open source releases, and if there's a private part it's paperwork you can show as proof of compliance for safety critical systems.
It’s fast, with unparalleled stability, arguably better managed than any other software on earth, deployed on literally everything, so let’s… fork it for street cred?
But with LLMs and massive, human-written test suites, rewrites aren’t a bad idea like they used to be. Rust is a perfect target language because it’s compiler is so strict and surfaces issues in a way that’s easy for either humans or LLMs to use.
Even if they weren’t, LLMs are pretty good at writing tests because of Github being in their training sets. I rarely find that their tests are bad unless I underspecified what the project is supposed to do.
Disclaimer that I only vibe-code for personal projects, so I haven’t tested this at business scale.
Turso has a booming OSS community with many contributors from outside the company and is fully MIT.