> In effect the company has a royalty on a communication stream that can do nothing but grow.
In hindsight, the desktop OS business reached saturation and it started to look like the automobile industry which is sensitive to the replacement rate of a long lived good. The introduction of SSD drives was probably analogous to the introduction of quality rust proofing in the early 90’s.
> SQLite does not compete with client/server databases. SQLite competes with fopen().
This undersells SQLite somewhat. Like Berkeley DB, SQLite was created as an alternative to dbm [1] and one of the main use cases is safe multi-process access to a single data file, typically CLI apps (written in C, TCL, etc.).
Client-Server databases tackle multi-user concurrency while embedded databases often tackle multi-process concurrency.
This article has long been part of the SQLite documentation found under the "Advocacy" section. There is also a short version. [2]
In hindsight, the desktop OS business reached saturation and it started to look like the automobile industry which is sensitive to the replacement rate of a long lived good. The introduction of SSD drives was probably analogous to the introduction of quality rust proofing in the early 90’s.