Internal Access The most deployed database software on the planet runs on a 6th-century Christian monastic code, voluntarily adopted as a one-way covenant. We think that’s worth talking about.
There is something that happens when you first read the governance page for SQLite. You scan past what you expect — the usual boilerplate about respectful communication and inclusive environments — and you land on a list that opens: “First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength.”
This is not a joke. This is not satire. This is the published Code of Ethics for the most deployed database software in human history — running inside every iPhone, every Android device, every copy of Google Chrome and Firefox, in cars, aeroplanes, embedded systems, and according to NASA, in Mars rovers. D. Richard Hipp wrote the first line of SQLite in 1999, largely by himself, while working on a project for the US Navy. Estimates suggest there are well over a trillion SQLite databases in active use today. The man who built it is a devout Christian from Charlotte, North Carolina, and he has never apologised for it.
The document has a mundane origin. Hipp originally created it to fill a “code of conduct” checkbox on supplier registration forms. When it surfaced publicly in 2018, the reaction was vivid — a mix of outrage, admiration, and genuine confusion about whether it was real. The Register ran the headline “SQLite creator crucified after code of conduct warns devs to love God.” Hipp’s response was to rename the document from “Code of Conduct” to “Code of Ethics” — which, he observed, was itself encouraged by rule 71: “Do not wish to be called holy before one is holy; but first to be holy, that you may be truly so called.”
What silences the usual objections is a single clause in the document’s framing. No contributor, user, or organisation is required to follow The Rule, know it, or even think it is a good idea. It applies to Hipp and his team alone. They describe it explicitly as a one-way promise, or covenant: “We will treat you this way regardless of how you treat us.”
That’s not a policy document. It’s a personal commitment. And that distinction matters more than most people stop to examine. Corporate codes of conduct are primarily about liability and reputation management — they govern what others must do, and they exist to be enforced outward. A covenant like this governs only the people who make it. It makes no demands on anyone else. That kind of ethical seriousness is rare in any sector, and almost unheard of in software.
The Rule Hipp adopted was written by Benedict of Nursia around AD 530 as a guide for monastic community life. It became the foundation of Western monasticism and, as the SQLite page notes, “has served as a baseline for many civil law codes since the time of Charlemagne.” This is not a newly minted philosophy produced by a working group. It has survived the fall of empires, the Reformation, and more than fifteen centuries of use across more cultural contexts than most governance frameworks could dream of.
Here is The Rule in full, exactly as it appears on the SQLite website:
What strikes us about this list is how specific and behavioural it is. Not principles, but practices. Not aspirations, but disciplines. These are not values statements displayed in a company foyer. They are demands — daily, concrete, and grounded in a view of human nature that takes both our capacity for virtue and our tendency toward its opposite with complete seriousness.
At JD Fortress, we’ve been thinking about this. Not because we plan to republish Hipp’s document or claim his covenant as our own — its weight comes partly from being his, specific and personal. But because we want to be the kind of company where the ethics are this concrete, this old, and this unapologetically grounded in the Word of God.
Modern technology culture has developed an intense interest in ethics as marketing. Responsible AI frameworks. Trust and safety teams. Values summits. The problem isn’t always insincerity — sometimes these efforts are genuine. But they are almost always disconnected from character, because they describe what a company wants to be seen to believe, rather than what the people inside it have actually committed to being.
What Hipp demonstrates — quietly, over twenty-five years, producing software that runs on Mars — is that a different approach is possible. Build from real conviction. Let the commitment run in one direction, binding only yourself. And let the work speak.
We’re not drawing a straight line from The Rule to the reliability of the codebase. But we’re not ignoring the connection either.
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