Hacker News Reader

How big of a business is SQLite?

Maybe SQLite isn't that big, but Red Hat makes billions of dollars of annual revenue. GitLab is a public decacorn (or was one yesterday, anyways). Those are good businesses, and I'm pretty sure a good chunk of us run software from both of these.

It’s a one man company run by Richard Hipp.

Big enough to keep the developers happy to keep working on it. That is all that matters.

This is how DuckDB is structured too:

DuckDB Labs: The core contributors. Instead of developing features that will be behind a paywall, they provide support and consulting.

DuckDB Foundation: A non-profit that ensures DuckDB remains MIT licensed.

0 - https://x.com/thisritchie/status/1797962367571239309

FWIW SQLite has 3 developers, and I don't think it's even full-time for all of them.

This can work because SQLite is deliberately a very small yet very high impact project.

Very few projects (unfortunately) can boast that.