Just curious, is there any financial compensation/support going to Richard Hipp with all of this money changing hands?
When I see these startups making a business that is so heavily based on open-source software (like Tailscale on top of Wireguard), I have to wonder what these companies do to actually support the author(s) of the software that so much of their company is based on.
Yes. We (Fly.io) are buying a sqlite support agreement. We also send money WireGuard's way. I'm pretty sure Tailscale does too.
We have also given OSS authors advisor equity. A couple of folks wrote libraries that were important to keeping us going, and we've granted them shares the same way some startups would to MBA advisors.
That's a fantastic idea. In retrospect it's a really obvious idea but I've never heard of anyone doing it before. Is this a common thing that I'm just oblivious to?
I agree Richard Hipp should be compensated but he explicitly licensed and releases SQLite under a public domain license: https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html Not Apache, not MIT, not GPL... public domain. You can do almost anything with it and not be beholden to any demands. You can tell people you built your business on SQLite... or not. It's public domain.
Sure, but Apache, MIT, and GPL licenses don't require payment to the author either. That's why it's up to the company to decide to offer compensation without being required to, and why I'm curious which companies actually do it.
It's like when RedHat when public and offered pre-IPO stock to open source developers.
When I see these startups making a business that is so heavily based on open-source software (like Tailscale on top of Wireguard), I have to wonder what these companies do to actually support the author(s) of the software that so much of their company is based on.