Isn’t it easier to say “embedded” and “severless”
"serverless" is a marketing term, then and now. Not sure why there's such a big defense of it. If you have to argue this much over the provenance of a term that clearly isn't used the same way today then it's a good sign that it's not very useful.
The archive.org links already provided to you prove that you're flat wrong about that. SQLite used the term many years before it was a webshit buzzword. They used it in the intuitive straight forward english sense; somebody who has no hat is hatless, somebody who has no home is homeless, and a database system that has no server process is serverless. In 2007 when it was written, nobody would have batted at eye at this term, the meaning would have been immediately clear to anybody who had any familiarity with databases.
It's a marketing term, and a poor one at that. That's why SQLite even describes itself as a embedded, in-process database without client/server architecture. Because that's the common jargon.
I'm surprised at the endless defense of a marketing buzzword and the argument over which marketing definition is the "real" one. This is bikeshedding at its finest.
Are you starting to notice the pattern here? "less" is a suffix that can be applied to nearly any noun to describe the trait of lacking that noun. When this is done, the meaning is clear to native English speakers who've never heard that combination before. When this article was written in 2007, the meaning was clear. SQLite didn't muddy anything, didn't redefine anything.
[1] The term 'serverless' was in fact in use in the decade and a half prior to 2007: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=serverless&yea... I don't know if the term was being used primarily in a technical context, but I have little doubt the term was being used to describe something that did not have a server. In fact I'm just about certain that spike was the term being used in a tech context. I've found you an example of the term being used in 1995 (DOI 10.1145/224057.224066):
> A serverless network file system distributes storage, cache, and control over cooperating workstations. This approach contrasts with traditional file systems such as Netware, NFS, [...] where a central server machine provides all file system services.
This is not precisely the same way that SQLite has used the term. Rather, they're using the term in an intuitive natural way that fits their context, just as SQLite used it in 2007.
Here is an example from 2007 (DOI: 10.1109/TNET.2006.886289):
> Abstract—We explore exploits possible for cheating in real-time, multiplayer games for both client-server and serverless architectures.
Here we have the term "serverless" clearly being contrasted with "client-server", which seems very similar to the way in which that SQLite document used it.