> Paid support options and products are provided by Hipp, Wyrick & Company, Inc., (Hwaci), a Georgia corporation with headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina and has been in business since 1992. Hwaci has an international team of employees and associates representing the best available talent. We are a 100% engineering company. There is no sales staff. Our goal is to provide outstanding service and honest advice without spin or sales-talk.
> Hwaci is a small company but it is also closely held and debt-free and has low fixed costs, which means that it is largely immune to buy-outs, take-overs, and market down-turns. Hwaci intends to continue operating in its current form, and at roughly its current size until at least the year 2050. We expect to be here when you need us, even if that need is many years in the future.
I read that as: it gives the impression it's been here forever, it's still being actively maintained, and will be for the foreseeable future. Benefiting from the “future” (sqlite4/perl6) at a slow but steady peace. So, really like Perl 5.
perl5 has been stealing a bunch of stuff from perl6 and is still actively maintained and doing a major release with new features annually - also continues to Just Work with an extreme commitment to backcompat.
So I'm pretty sure he did mean perl5, and as a happy user of both perl5 and sqlite the comparison seems apt.
For context, rurban has had a long-ongoing feud with the perl5 maintainers that eventually resulted in his removal from the mailing list for being unwilling or unable to disagree sufficiently civilly to hold an effective discussion when people felt he was technically incorrect.
He's also, OTOH, a technically brilliant developer whose positive contributions will be missed.
(also if you ever run into him at a conference, I'd recommend grabbing a beer with him, I've always enjoyed doing so in spite of our spirited disagreements over various things)
The kind that give away their product for free, give the company to their wife, develop an in-house distributed version control (fossil (which is excellent)), give that away for free and encourage other version control projects to please steal ideas from fossil. drh (Richard Hipp) is an interesting duck.
Ones that have effectively 100% test coverage on their codebases, massive existing deployments, famous levels of documentation, and world expert level comprehension of their problem space.
SQLite is used for small and embedded systems, which (if successful) can have very long lifetimes. If you were building something like an ATM for instance, you would be very sensible to sign a 35-year support contract for a crucial part of your system.
Microsoft has nowhere near the quality, security and bug-fix track record, documentation coverage, nor testsuite coverage that SQLite offers. There's simply no way they can possibly provide such support.
There are products that Microsoft offers long support contracts for. To give an example, EOL for XP Embedded is in April 2019, which means XP in all its forms would've been supported for about 18 years.
At the same time, given the quality of the code base and the test coverage, I can imagine supporting a code base that I believe in and am extremely proud of, and that is extremely popular and widely used, for 35 years.
https://www.hwaci.com/sw/sqlite/prosupport.html
> Paid support options and products are provided by Hipp, Wyrick & Company, Inc., (Hwaci), a Georgia corporation with headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina and has been in business since 1992. Hwaci has an international team of employees and associates representing the best available talent. We are a 100% engineering company. There is no sales staff. Our goal is to provide outstanding service and honest advice without spin or sales-talk.
> Hwaci is a small company but it is also closely held and debt-free and has low fixed costs, which means that it is largely immune to buy-outs, take-overs, and market down-turns. Hwaci intends to continue operating in its current form, and at roughly its current size until at least the year 2050. We expect to be here when you need us, even if that need is many years in the future.