SQLite is closed to outside contributions.
> but isn’t this a fork risk
Sure. But don't expect a fork to succeed beyond the original. It's not like egcs/gcc where existing developers were unhappy and wanted to break free from perceived dysfunction.
Incorrect.
Anyone is allowed to contributed to the SQLite code base. There is no religious test, nor even any code-of-conducts requirements for being able to contribute to SQLite. This has always been the case. But the barrier to making contributions is high - higher than many other projects. There are two main reasons for this:
(1) Any contributions need to be able to demonstrate, with legal rigor, that they are in the public domain. Otherwise, if copyrighted code were introduced, SQLite itself would cease to be in the public domain. The SQLite project places a lot of emphasis on provenance of the code.
(2) Contributions need to demonstrate that they will be useful to a very wide audience, and that they will not diminish our ability to maintain the code for decades into the future. Most of the effort in a project like SQLite is long-term maintenance. People might be really proud of the work they have done on some patch over a day, or week, or month. But the amount of work needed to generate the patch is nothing compared to the amount of work they are asking the developers to put into testing, documenting, and maintaining that patch for the life of the project (currently projected to be 27 more years).
Many people, and even a few companies, have contributed code to SQLite over the years. I have legal documentation for all such contributions in the firesafe in my office. We are able to track every byte of the SQLite source code back to its original creator. The project has been and continues to be open to outside contributions, as long as those contributions meet high standards of provenance and maintainability.
There is some group that may change that is “the contributors” which are presumably bound by the CoC. I also assume this group changes from time to time.
Are you sure SQLite doesn’t accept outside contributions? Usually for CoCs you mean the whole project including for any contribution such as bug reports, which are some times more “open” than code contributions.
Apparently the rule isn’t required (which is even stranger, so the whole thing is just pointless anyway).