What does HackerNews think of libsql?

libSQL is a fork of SQLite that is both Open Source, and Open Contributions.

Language: C

#30 in Database
#79 in Rust
https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

To summarize, instead of using one of the OSS licenses, the copyright holders simply declare the source to be in the public domain. In order to preserve that status they don't accept patches unless you submit some signed document that you agree with that.

To make things more complicated, they also use their a relatively niche version management system instead of git. Which would complicate making contributions (if they accepted them).

There's a popular fork that fixes all of these issues: https://github.com/libsql/libsql It is MIT licensed, on Github, and open for contributions.

Kind of a weird legal situation for a popular project like this that so many people depend on to have. Not judging; but it is odd. Seems like a lot of wasted efforts between users, would be contributors, and the people that forked this thing to address all that.

The next blog post can be about how to submit the change to libSQL [1], so other people can take advantage of it.

[1] https://github.com/libsql/libsql

From the README in https://github.com/libsql/libsql:

> Could SQLite be embedded in the Linux kernel?

Choosing to license the fork under Apache-2.0 ensures that this will not happen (via this fork, at least), as the license is considered incompatible with the kernel's GPL-2.0-only license.

Whether or not this succeeds, I think it's a great effort. SQLite not taking any outside contributions is of course their prerogative. But it would also be cool to see what could happen with a more open development model. And their (libsql) plans around io_uring and Rust for future code both sound like a good start.

The way they're going about this fork (described in the repo [0] readme) seems healthy enough for both projects as well.

Maybe the biggest challenge though is recreating SQLite's private/proprietary test suite [1].

[0] https://github.com/libsql/libsql

[1] https://www.sqlite.org/th3.html