Dr. Hipp is one of my heroes. He seems to labor quietly in semi obscurity for decades, and at the end of it he's produced some amazing software. I was tickled by the curfuffle over his use of a set of guidelines for living in a Christian monastery as SQLite's code of ethics for the purpose of checking a box on an RFQ (part of the fallout of the libsql fork), because he does seem like a sort of programmer monk. (For what it's worth, as an agnostic, I've read them several times and found them unobjectionable. While I think the drama was unnecessary, the libsql people are doing interesting work.)
I choose never to meet this man and be disabused of this notion. Shine on, doctor.
In fairness, I think the complaint over the tongue-in-cheek 'code of conduct' was that it was transparently unsuitable if considered as an actual code of conduct (i.e. a list of rules that SQLite contributors must obey in order to participate in the project). For example, it seems unlikely that Dr. Hipp would wish to exclude contributors who have committed adultery, or who do not pray with sufficient frequency.
(The erstwhile code of conduct is now labeled a 'code of ethics', and AFAIK SQLite has no official CoC currently.)
To me it seemed like they had incompatible visions (SQLite wants to work in 2050 in the contexts it's been traditionally used in, libsql wants to modernize and lean into the more recent use cases) and so a fork was the appropriate and inevitable course of action.
Given that SQLite isn't really open to contribution (one of libsql's frustrations) it doesn't really worry me that they didn't & don't have a clear code of conduct. To me, digging through the repository [ETA: the website, rather] for what amounts to a cringey Easter egg and then linking to it as if it were a serious issue is uncalled for. To be honest, I think the complaints shouldn't stayed out of their announcement entirely - they have a legitimately cool vision for what their fork could be, and the complaints were only a distraction.
Yes, it's an important point that SQLite is not a project with an open contribution model. However, they do presumably accept external contributions in the form of bug reports, suggested patches, etc. etc.
Another cool project from Dr. Hipp is the fossil SCM, which SQLite is developed in, and one of it's features is that it ships with a web view similar to GitHub. The website is actually the web view of the repo. (Apologies for expressing that in a confusing way, I knew it was on the website, I was referring to the website as the repository.)
The blatant religious discrimination in the document is both not a problem at all if the author is the only contributor (I suppose thetr must be some form of arms-length way of consuming external support from less beholden entities; I don't know the details of Critical Code of Conduct Theory), and totally unacceptable otherwise.
Following the document itself, it should be rewritten if it ever intends to include other people, and should be explicitly clarified that the current form only applies to the author himself.
