Sqlite project and license

cbrake · February 26, 2021, 4:19pm

The sqlite license is interesting:

sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/LICENSE.md

The author disclaims copyright to this source code.  In place of
a legal notice, here is a blessing:

  *   May you do good and not evil.
  *   May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
  *   May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

I don’t know enough to claim it is good/bad/otherwise – just somewhat refreshing in our culture of legalese.

It also appears the author has built a business for many years around supporting sqlite:

And the way he runs his project is unique – open source, but not open-contribution:

https://sqlite.org/copyright.html

Open-Source, not Open-Contribution

SQLite is open-source, meaning that you can make as many copies of it as you want and do whatever you want with those copies, without limitation. But SQLite is not open-contribution. In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and ensure that the code does not become contaminated with proprietary or licensed content, the project does not accept patches from unknown persons.

All of the code in SQLite is original, having been written specifically for use by SQLite. No code has been copied from unknown sources on the internet.

This model probably won’t work for most projects, but is interesting and seems to be working for this project.