Textbook of Linux

b. 1961, United States — Founder, Hipp Wyrick & Co; SQLite author and architect

Also known as: Hipp, D. Richard Hipp, drh

D. Richard Hipp wrote SQLite in 2000, originally for a US Navy battleship damage-control system that couldn't rely on a database server being reachable. SQLite is now almost certainly the most-deployed database engine in the world, embedded in every iPhone and Android phone, every web browser, every major desktop OS, Adobe products, Skype, Airbus A350 avionics, and countless other places. By some estimates there are over a trillion SQLite databases in active use.

SQLite is unusual among open-source projects: Hipp's company, Hipp Wyrick & Co, develops it commercially but releases the code into the public domain (not even under a permissive licence). Testing is famously rigorous — the codebase has about a hundred lines of test code for every line of production code, and uses a combination of unit tests, fuzz tests, and custom mutation-testing frameworks.

Hipp's design philosophy — stable APIs, long-term support, extreme simplicity — has made SQLite one of the most boring and most durable pieces of software in the ecosystem.