I think it's fair to say they tried using SQLite but apparently had to bail out. Their use case is a distributed DBaaS with local-first semantics, they started out with SQLite and only now seem to be pivoting to "SQLite-compatible".

Building off of that into a SQLite-compatible DB doesn't seem to me as trying to piggyback on the brand. They have no other option as their product was SQLite to begin with.

No that's completely incorrect. It's compatible with SQLite, not just in the same spirit:

> SQLite compatibility for SQL dialect, file formats, and the C API

It stopped being compatible with SQLite even before the Rust rewrite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42386894

That doesn't seem very fair. It's still beta and clearly far from finished. And they do call out the compromises - they have a whole page about how they are not yet fully compatible:

https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso/blob/main/COMPAT.md

I don't think that's fine at all, it's quite a shitty thing to do hoenstly and I'm not surprised it's a VC backed company doing it.

How would you do it then?

I'd probably wouldn't ride the coattails of another open source project that provides hundreds of billions in value for free annually for anyone on this Earth in order to make a quick buck. IDK I have morals and it seems if you want VC funding you must lack them.

It's no different than the hucksters that take public domain books and slut them up in order to make some coin peddling smut.