tl;dr: The author of rqlite, which in 2014 pioneered combining SQLite with a Raft consensus log for replication, traces twelve years of the "distributed SQLite" category through projects like dqlite, Litestream, LiteFS, cr-sqlite, libSQL/Turso, and Cloudflare D1. He argues the design space settled into three corners—consensus (strong consistency clusters), streaming (cheap single-node recovery), and merge (CRDT-based eventual consistency)—each answering a different question. Open-source projects defined the category for eight years before venture-funded platforms monetized it, while rqlite remains the self-hosted, no-bill option.