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Why do you view a "standard" or "dozens of implementations" as a good thing - what is the context of your evaluation?

Why is it not comparable, if not significantly better, to have a mostly uniform public domain code base that has been deployed to billions of devices?

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The diversity of mutually compatible implementations avoids a dominant implementation's critical issue being catastrophic and keeps the standard moving to the direction no single party can totally influence. SQLite does have a list of semi-standardized requirements [1] which should technically allow for alternative implementations---not having them today makes it less viable as a true standard.

[1] https://www.sqlite.org/requirements.html

A better starting point might be the database file format description.

https://www.sqlite.org/fileformat.html

lifthrasiir also sort of touched on this (and I endorse their comment), but as a thought experiment, imagine what word processing formats would look like if MSFT hadn't owned .doc, but instead, WordPerfect and maybe two other competitors also shared the format.

When a popular format can't be unilaterally controlled by one actor, both the users and the market as a whole tend to be better off.

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