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Comment by maxloh | Hacker News Reader

SQLite itself is open source, but the last time I checked, its test suite remains proprietary.

How does a "fork" like this be tested if everything stays working and compatible to upstream after the change?

The general test suite is not proprietary, and is a standard part of the code. You can run make test. It uses TCL to run the testing, and covers virtually everything.

There is a separate TH3 test suite which is proprietary. It generates C code of the tests so you can run the testing in embedded and similar environments, as well as coverage of more obscure test cases.

https://sqlite.org/th3.html

Why is that? Surely that leads to conversations with open source contributors like 'this fails the test suite, but I can't show you, please fix it'?

SQLite doesn’t accept contributions

This isn't an issue as SQLite doesn't accept contributions because they don't want to risk someone submitting proprietary code and lying about its origin.

I've never understood why other large open-source projects are just willing to accept contributions from anyone. What's the plan when someone copy-pastes code from some proprietary codebase and the rights holders finds it?

The "plan" is to take out the contaminated code and rewrite it.

If the rights holder is particularly litigious then I could see them suing even if you agreed to take out their code under the argument that you've distributed it and profited from it. I don't know if there's been any cases of this historically but I'd be surprised if there hasn't been.

Every open source project has the possibility of litigation. Can't always live in fear of the bogeyman

The same issue is present with the use of LLMs. Are you absolutely sure it didn't just repeat some copyrighted code at you?

Partly why they have CLAs I suppose?

If someone sells me something they stole, I'm not on the hook for the theft.

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