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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

And so does the Linux kernel. There are numerous cases of successes and failures at both ends of that spectrum.

My point wasn't to imply that you can only pick one, but that in some cases choices to maximize one aspect can negatively affect the other if care is not taken, and depending on audience high quality released software is not the only thing under consideration in open source projects. Keeping the developer group small and being extremely selective of what outside code or ideas are allowed might bring benefits in quality, but if not carefully considered could yield long term problems that ultimately harm a project.

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> > > Extremely well written and maintained and high quality as of now and having a plan to make sure that can continue in the future are sometimes entirely different things with needs that oppose each other.

> [...], but if not carefully considered could yield long term problems that ultimately harm a project.

SQLite has a successful consortium and a successful business model, namely: leveraging a proprietary test suite to keep a monopoly on SQLite development that then drives consortium membership and, therefore, consortium success, which then funds the SQLite team.

This has worked for a long time now. It will not work forever. It should work for at least the foreseeable future. If it fails it will be either because a fork somehow overcomes the lack of access to the SQLite proprietary test suite, or because a competitor written in a better programming language arises and quickly gains momentum and usage, and/or because the SQLite Consortium members abandon the project.

Very good points. The proprietary test suite is clearly the (open) secret to SQLite's success. It seems to me that it isn't even entirely accurate to describe SQLite as written in C when the vast majority of its code is probably written in TCL that none of us have seen. It's more like C is just how they represent the virtual machine which is described and specified by its tests. The virtual machine exists outside of any particular programming language but C is the most convenient implementation language to meet their cross platform distribution goals.

If someone did want to carve into SQLite's embedded db monopoly, it would take years to develop a comparable test suite. This seems possible, particularly if they develop a more expressive language for expressing the solutions to the types of problems that we use SQLite for. Who would fund this work though when SQLite works as well as it does?

MongoDB folks started working on the SQLite alternative - Realm.

Ultimately, the long term harm I was thinking of (for the most part) was lots of proprietary knowledge being lost as a developer is lost for one reason or another, and a resulting loss in quality and/or momentum in the project as that developer may represent a large percentage of project development capacity.

That a large chunk of this knowledge appears to have been offloaded into a test suite is good, and does a lot to combat this, but obviously nothing is quite as good as experience and skill and knowledge about the specifics of the code in question.

As a theoretical situation, how much more likely is a fork to eventually succeed if one or more of the code SQLite developers is no longer available to contribute to SQLite? There are a lot of variables that go into that, but I would feel comfortable saying "more likely than if those developers were still present". That idea encapsulates some of the harm I was thinking of.

Institutional knowledge, and leadership, is indeed critical. The knowledge of a codebase can be re-bootstrapped, and its future can be re-conceived, but actually providing leadership is another story. I think there's one person on the SQLite team besides D. R. Hipp who can provide that leadership, but I'm not sure about business leadership, though who am I to speculate, when I don't really know any of them. All I can say is that from outside looking in, SQLite looks pretty solid, and libSQL seems unfunded.

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