Comment by ndiddy
17 hours ago
The thing that worries me the most about Turso is that rather than the small, stable team running SQLite, Turso is a VC backed startup trying to capitalize on the AI boom. I can easily see how SQLite's development is sustainable, but not Turso's. They're currently trying to grow their userbase as quickly as possible with their free open source offering, but when they have investors breathing down their necks asking about how they're going to get 100x returns I'm not sure how long that'll last. VCs generally expect companies they invest in to grow to $100 million in revenue in 5-10 years. If your use of their technology doesn't help them get there, you should expect to be rugpulled at some point.
I too am weary of VC incentives but:
1) It's MIT licensed. Including the test suite which is something lacking in SQLite:
https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso
2) They have a paid cloud option to drive income from:
https://turso.tech/pricing
"Including the test suite which is something lacking in SQLite"
That's not entirely true. SQLite has a TON of tests that are part of the public domain project: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/tree/master/test
They do have a test suite that's private which I understand to be more about testing for different hardware - they sell access to that for companies that want SQLite to work on their custom embedded hardware, details here: https://sqlite.org/th3.html
> SQLite Test Harness #3 (hereafter "TH3") is one of three test harnesses used for testing SQLite.
> 2) They have a paid cloud option to drive income from:
I’ve been confused by this for a while. What is it competing with? Surely not SQLite, being client server defeats all the latency benefits. I feel it would be considered as an alternative to cloud Postgres offerings, and it seems unlikely they could compete on features. Genuinely curious, but is there any sensible use case for this product, or do they just catch people who read SQLite was good on hacker news, but didn’t understand any of the why.
The thing that cooks my noodle - who are these insane people who want to beta test a new database? Yes, all databases could have world destroying data loss/corruption, but I have significantly more confidence in a player than has been on the market for many years.
The article talks about this. If you have a project that starts small and an in-process DB is fine, but you end up needing to scale up then you don't have to switch DBs.
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Elasticsearch was license under Apache 2.0 until they switched.
That says enough.
to AGPL3?
Are there any VC-funded open source projects that didn't attempt rug pulls? (There must be, right?)
metabase.com, but metabase is intended for business analyst types and is AGPL, with shenanigans for embedding and an enterprise edition thing
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Grafana has been a pretty good steward of OSS. Whether you like their products or not, they've been able to balance the OSS and commercial offerings fairly well.
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Whether or not they attempt rug pulls, or other slimy measures to extort money from entrenched users... this VC backed OSS startups have given us some nice things. People fork the permissively licensed code when the scumbuckets get too smelly and the company goes on to irrelevancy while people use the actually OSS version.
The MIT licensing makes this even less trustworthy. I can image a major cloud or fly.io just proprietary forking them as a service, as cloud providers have done for years.
So what? The MIT licensed original will still be there, you don't lose out on anything if that happens. And also, SQLite itself is public domain, so by your logic we shouldn't trust SQLite either. Which is crazy.
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> test suite which is something lacking in SQLite
You must be kidding. Last time I checked, sqlite was mostly extensive test suites.
It's covered in the article. The full SQLite test suite isn't open source, so you (the third party) don't have the same confidence in your modifications as the SQLite team does.
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I think they meant that the test suite is not open source. You’re right that it is extensive.
Yeah, that's not a good environment for this kind of engineering. You need long term stability for a project like this, slow incremental development with a long term plan, and that's antithetical to VC culture.
On the other hand, Rust code and the culture of writing Rust leads to far more modularity, so maybe some useful stuff will come of it even if the startup fails.
I have been excited to see real work on databases in Rust, there are massive opportunities there.
where do you see these opportunities? i didnt see a lot of issues personally rust would be better at than C in this domain. care to elaborate? (genuinely curious!)
personally i see more benefit in rust for example as ORM and layers that talk to the database. (those are often useful to have in such an ecossystem so you can use the database safe and sanely, like python or so but then u know, fast and secure.)
You need to be crazy to use an ORM. I personally think that even SQL is redundant. I would like to see a high quality embedded database written in Rust.
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I was excited about this for a second until seeing your comment.
Unless you are Amazon which has the resources to maintain a fork (which is questionable by itself with all the layoffs), you probably shouldn't touch this.
Some lessons about the modern distaste for copyleft here IMO
Completely agree, I'm looking at pretty much all software this way nowadays.
We've all been around long enough to know that "free" VC-backed software always means "free... until it's in our interest to charge for it". And yet users will still complain about the rugpull in 2026, no matter how many times they've been through it. "Fool me once, shame on you"
I've lost the count of how many times people were fooled by VC backed companies in this forum.