You're not wrong about VC-funded database arc, but what history are you even talking about?
I am sure you understand that I have absolutely nothing to do with Scylla's licensing. I have not worked there for four years nor was I ever in a position there that I would even had that opportunity to influence such decisions.
I am also sure you understand that Scylla's development model was completely different: they had AGPL license and contributors had to sign a CLA, which is why they were able to relicense in the first place. Turso is MIT licensed and there's no barrier to contributing and, therefore, already a much bigger contributor base.
I fully understand the scepticism, but you're mistaken about the open source history of Turso's founders.
The project is MIT licensed with a growing community of contributors. It does not even matter how long the company lives, all that matters is that some of the core contributors live.
The actual reality is that I personally started the project because its synchronous architecture is holding back performance. You can read all about it in https://penberg.org/papers/penberg-edgesys24.pdf. The design is literally the next evolution of SQLite's architecture.
If you already know C, you can start out by looking at the machine code generated by your compiler with "objdump -d" on Linux and "otool -tV" on Mac. Start experimenting by writing out C constructs like functions, loops, switch statements, etc., and just looking at what the generated code looks like.
Of course, to do that, you need to find the manual for your machine architecture. The x86 manuals are, for example, available here: