Submitted by “In a world of people obsessed by turning the tiniest idea into something profitable, Dr Richard Hipp’s best-known software stands out for two reasons – he actively disclaims copyright in it; and at a time when multi-megabyte installations are booming, he has a self-imposed limit on the size of his product: 250KB. And he’s stuck to both aims. ‘I think we’ve got 15 kilobytes of spare space,’ he says of the headroom left in the code.”
Genezzo also has a fairly small footprint although it’s still in Beta:
http://search.cpan.org/~jcohen/Genezzo-0.69/
Probably. But SQLite is public domain, this is probably why so many companies are embedding it into their applications. SQLite is great for applications such as Firefox.
I find it beautiful when I see someone making software almost because it can be done; it has an artistic sense to it, “ars gratia artis”. This man deserves a lot of respect.
Hipp deserves a lot of credit. Somehow he managed to be the creator of one of the most used software libraries in the world… it’s even something that almost everyone who uses likes, almost everyone maybe using something using his library (see Google Gears)… even better, anyone can use and do as they are pleased to do… no second troughs.
We need more people like Hipp!
CoreData on OS X is basically a wrapper around SQLite. PHP now ships with it included (5.2.0+), Firefox already includes it, and will use it more extensively in v3…
Fedora packaga manager YUM is also using SQLite.
Also check out http://www.tinyapps.org a website that lists very small programs, all well under a meg, some as small as 15K.
My hat goes off to the man, I remember the days of coding in 64Kb RAM, only 22K of which was actually available. The limits of the hardware is the muse of the software engineer.
He has a cool name, DR HIPP.
But SQLite. I could never have done http://www.studlar.net without SQLite.
DR HIPP, my hat off to you. You are a good person, almost no one I know would ever put this good software into public domain.
Trausti
Studlar Software
The first version of Mac OS, launched in 1984 was about 20-24 Kb of size.
Sheesh…
I remember seeing some nice demos on the atari st who were coded in the around 300 bytes available of the boot sector of a floppy…
Lol… the greatest among them had first to uncompress some data before they ran…
The man is a bloody hero in my book
I’m using it at the moment and as far as I’m concerned his project is one of the most valuable little tools available to an applications programmer today.
He may not have my cash (I will make a donation when my product is a success), but he certainly has my respect
and the true Floss zealots – if you are giving it away – for **** sake just give it away. If you are talking Free as in Freedom, what is more free than that?
The FSF is all about restrictions and some whack-job socialist agenda… It’s zealots so rabidly buying the propaganda that from the way they talk they want to do away with your CHOICE to use anything non-GPL. GPL v3 is loaded with clauses to try an hijack anything released using v3, to have everything else alongside it v3 – despite their now fervent claims to the contrary. Be wary of people looking to take away freedoms in the name of freedom, it’s a form of double talk I am AMAZED anyone is DUMB ENOUGH to fall for.
But what does one expect when the FSF was founded over Stallman’s sour grapes over giving something away, then not getting a cut when the people he gave it to did something meaningful with it. YOU GAVE IT AWAY STUPID!!!… Well, that and sour grapes over the fact that the REAL computer revolution of the 80’s and 90’s was driven BY THE COMMERCIAL AVAILABILITY OF SOFTWARE to the consumer by companies like Lotus, Microsoft, Borland – Starting with hobbyists like Woz, Bricklin and Uncle Clive, marketing men like Jobs, Kahn and Gates, and major corporations like Apple, Microsoft and AOL – It was NOT the back-room server unix guys like Stallman or the Career computer educators of that time – They are the ones who really did get ‘left behind’. NONE of the names we traditionally associate with the personal computer revolution come from the unix server world – a fact that I bet drives the likes of Stallman completely nuts.
But with the dirty hippy “corporations are the ultimate evil, we have to fight them by rocking out to a crunchy groove” mentality that permeates everything the FSF does, one really cannot expect much out of them.
So I applaud Richard Hipp – because he hit it on the head with: “Why not just put it in the public domain? Why have these restrictions on it?”
Remember, when people talk about removing your freedom of choice while throwing out the phrase “Free as in freedom” like a religious mantra… well, does the term “Snake Oil” ring a bell? Naive ideals are all well and good, but make sure you read the fine print. It’s like the leftist kooks have been allowed to hijack what was once the cardware community. (Which is still my favorite ‘license’ – If you enjoyed the program, send me a post card)
As to the program – I doubly applaud the efforts and restrictions on size… There really is little reason for a modern SQL database to be much larger than the Borland Paradox you could run off a single floppy a decade and a half ago… Especially when I think about the fact I used to support a 500 user Netware 3.12 install typically with >10 user requests a second with a bunch of paradox and clipper applications off a single 486DX-50 with 64 megs of RAM, and that’s with a good 60 or so of those users network booting – while today a dual Xeon starts to choke doing half the records in php and mySQL with a mere 5 requests a second barely being able to handle 150 users at once…
I think you’re forgetting that just as it should be a choice to offer closed source software and bsd/mit open source software, there should also be a choice to offer GPL 3, restrictions and all. Yes, Windows and Apache are very popular but so are GCC, linux and openoffice. As long as government doesn’t force everyone to use GPL, I see it as a valid alternative for developers who believe their software is best developed with that model.
Sun has a bottom line but they have chosen GPL 3. Maybe they know a few things the hippies don’t.
I would have to say that after using SQLite for the last few years at work, it is one of the true bright spots in the open software world!
It is fast and easy to use. The best of both worlds.
I don’t see the advantage over the BSD License, where the only condition for modifying and/or redistributing is a proper copyright notice. Nothing else. What exactly does he think is wrong with giving credit where credit is due?
Edited 2007-06-22 19:25