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Comment by ec109685 | Hacker News Reader

Are there really questions about using SQLite?

> Another wrinkle is that it’s not exactly open source. The original developer of SQLite, Dwane Richard Hipp, placed it in the public domain. Generally, this means that there are no legal restrictions on using the code at all, although there are some questions whether every country recognizes this view.

A bigger issue than the license is that it’s not open for contributions. They don’t accept pull requests and the extensive test suite is proprietary.

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> A bigger issue than the license is that it’s not open for contributions

SQLite is open for contributions, as long as you "submit an affidavit dedicating your contribution into the public domain" (https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html). It's not "Open-Contribution" in the sense that some npm packages are for example, where if you send any PR, it will most likely be merged and then you get write access to the repository. If you're curious how you can contribute, check out this page: https://system.data.sqlite.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/cont...

Personally, I prefer projects that are limited in what contributions they accept to the main trunk. Code quality tends to be a lot higher in those. As long as the source is open so I can freely maintain my own patches, I have no qualms with that workflow.

Although that affidavit is still a problem for some. Both German and Australian citizens cannot revoke their human rights and as such cannot put things into public domain. Hence cannot ever contribute to sqlite.

This may be seen as advantageous however.

Does this mean they can't contribute to open-source MIT-equivalent licensed code bases? As that's basically giving that code to the public domain, is it not?

"Public Domain Is Not Open Source | Open Source Initiative" - https://opensource.org/node/878

That article's argument is that you can't be sure that you have rights to use public domain software because there are legal differences in how public domain works in different countries.

I do not find this argument very persuasive. Other aspects and of IP law and of licensing related law are different in different countries too.

If I find some software purportedly from a developer in Wheretheheckisthatistan that says it is under some OSI-approved license all that tells me is that the developer (probably) tried to license it under that license. But I have no idea if they actually succeeded in doing so--for instance maybe their employment agreement for their day job says it belongs to the employer and they are in a country where such agreements are enforceable.

No. Explicitly licensing things is fine as you still retain copyright, but are allowing others to use and modify.

I'm sure there are other countries that have restrictions towards who can contribute to US-based projects as well. Unfortunate yes, but hardly the fault of SQLite.

I'm curious about the "citizens cannot revoke their human rights and as such cannot put things into public domain" part of your comment. How does putting something into public domain revoke anything regarding your human rights?

I am not a lawyer but my understanding is that copyright is considered a human right, hence being non revokable for citizens in Australia and Germany.

Hence you must explicitly licence to allow reuse.

It's why personally if I want something as free as possible I dual licence under Unlicense and MIT with the user able to take whichever suits them best.

What's the human right angle on me assigning the copyright of my work to the public domain?

In another comment, but my understanding is that you cannot revoke your copyright over anything you create, but can make it free for use by others. Hence you must licence appropriately.

In https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html they specifically talk about how to use SQLite in a jurisdiction that does not recognize the public domain. And major projects like Android and Safari use SQLite globally, so clearly the legal risks are limited.

Any legal risk, and Hwaci can avoid employing people from problematic jurisdictions (from their POV). I suspect there is a workaround anyway: Hwaci can require any German developers to assign copyright of code to Hwaci, and then Hwaci can put that code into the public domain.

Regardless, Hwaci mention that SQLite is “Open-Source, not Open-Contribution” and also say “the project does not accept patches. If you would like to suggest a change and you 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.”.

100% you can use it even in Germany. I was more pointing out that for some people contributing to public domain software or any work is problematic.

This is what I was referring to: “SQLite is open-source but it is not open-contribution. All the code in SQLite is written by a small team of experts. The project does not accept "pull requests" or patches from anonymous passers-by on the internet.”

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

Yeah, that statement means you have to make yourself known before contributing, via the procedure I described earlier.

It doesn't mean they don't accept contributions at all, just that they are strict about who can contribute.

It's not that easy. Have you tried?

The main problem is that with your contribution you're making them do the work of writing tests for their proprietary 100% branch coverage suite to cover your contribution.

Spelling fixes and such are trivially accepted. Everything else is not.

This.

The public domain thing is a red herring not worthy of the attention it's gotten, but the infeasibility of making contributions is very much worth talking about.

Basically, Richard Hipp is an open source business genius. He made an exceedingly popular open source thing. Then he found a way to make it so no one would bother using any forks. Then he created a consortium that pays for development and upkeep.

The secret to that success is the proprietary test suite and their refusal to accept contributions. Anyone wanting to fork the code base will not be able to recreate that test suite, nor the upkeep, therefore they won't be anywhere near as trusted as the SQLite dev team.

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