"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.

Elasticsearch was license under Apache 2.0 until they switched.

That says enough.

Are there any VC-funded open source projects that didn't attempt rug pulls? (There must be, right?)

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.

> test suite which is something lacking in SQLite

You must be kidding. Last time I checked, sqlite was mostly extensive test suites.