We are pleased to announce the launch of the Presto Software Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of the Presto open source distributed SQL engine. The foundation is committed to ensuring the project remains open, collaborative and independent for decades to come.
We started the Presto project in 2012 as a small team at Facebook, with the goals of building a high performance, standards compliant, easy-to-use and dependable query engine capable of scaling to the largest datasets (exabyte scale) in the world. From day one, we designed and developed Presto to be maintained by an independent open source community.
In 2013, we released Presto under the Apache License and opened development to the public. Since then, the Presto community has expanded globally, with developers in Brazil, China, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Poland, Singapore, the U.S., the U.K., and more. In recent years, the center of gravity of the Presto community has shifted, with the majority of contributions now coming from developers outside of Facebook.
From the beginning, we stressed the importance of code quality, architectural extensibility, and open collaboration with the community. With the rapid expansion of both the Presto user base and Presto developer community over the last several years, establishing a non-profit to institutionalize these values is the next logical step to ensure that this project stands the test of time.
The foundation is dedicated to preserving the vision of high quality, performant and dependable software developed by an open, collaborative and independent community of developers throughout the world. Everyone is welcome to participate, whether it be via code contributions, suggestions for improvements, or bug reports.