Azért az hozzátartozik a képhez, hogy bár az sqlite forráskódja elérhető, de nem igazi opensource project, mert nem fogad külső módosításokat. Még verziókövetéshez is saját megoldást használ a git helyett: https://sqlite.org/whynotgit.html
Így ez inkább csak egy trollkodás, mintsem valódi szabályrendszer.
"I have an assistant, Dan Kennedy, an Australian living in Thailand, who contributes a lot of code," Hipp says. "He works for me, I pay him. There are some people at Google who have been contributing to the full text search capability. But Dan and I have done in excess of 99% of the code."
One of the limiting factors is that anyone contributing code must waive their copyright. "I require anyone who contributes code to sign a copyright disclaimer, and I keep those copyright disclaimers in my fire safe," Hipp says.
Less than half of the program code is delivered as the database engine. The larger part consists of thousands of automated tests, which exercise the code and check that the results are as expected. "That's the real key to keeping it working well," he says.
"It's very clear to me that if I'd had any business sense whatsoever I could have made a lot of money, but I don't," he says. "I like to tell people that we make enough to live fine in Charlotte, North Carolina. We don't make nearly enough money to live in London or San Francisco, but we don't live there so that's OK," he adds - with a touch, just a touch, of wistfulness.