Simon Willison’s Weblog

Copyright Release for Contributions To SQLite. D. Richard Hipp called me out for spreading misinformation on Hacker News that SQLite refuses outside contributions:

No, Simon, we don't "refuse". We are just very selective and there is a lot of paperwork involved to confirm the contribution is in the public domain and does not contaminate the SQLite core with licensed code.

I deeply regret this error! I'm linking to the copyright release document here - it looks like SQLite's public domain nature makes this kind of clause extremely important:

[...] To the best of my knowledge and belief, the changes and enhancements that I have contributed to SQLite are either originally written by me or are derived from prior works which I have verified are also in the public domain and are not subject to claims of copyright by other parties.

Out of curiosity I decided to see how many people have contributed to SQLite outside of the core team of Richard, Dan and Joe. I ran that query using Fossil, SQLite's own SQLite-based version control system, like this:

brew install fossil
fossil clone https://www.sqlite.org/src sqlite.fossil
fossil sql -R sqlite.fossil "
  SELECT user, COUNT(*) as commits
  FROM event WHERE type='ci'
  GROUP BY user ORDER BY commits DESC
"

I got back 38 rows, though I think danielk1977 and dan may be duplicates.