We’re rebranding PrestoSQL as Trino. The software and the community you have come to love and depend on aren’t going anywhere, we are simply renaming. Trino is the new name for PrestoSQL, the project supported by the founders and creators of Presto® along with the major contributors – just under a shiny new name. And now you can find us here:
- GitHub: https://github.com/trinodb/trino. Please give it a star!
- Twitter: @trinodb
- Slack: https://trino.io/slack.html
If you want to learn why we’re doing this, read on…
In 2012, Dain, David and Martin joined the Facebook data infrastructure team. Together with Eric Hwang, we created Presto® to address the problems of low latency interactive analytics over Facebook’s massive Hadoop data warehouse. One of our non-negotiable conditions was for Presto® to be an open source project. Open source is in our DNA - we had all used and participated in open source projects to various degrees in the past, and we recognized the power of open communities and developers coming together to build successful software that can stand the test of time.
Over the next six years, we worked hard to build a healthy open source community and ecosystem around the project. We worked with developers and users all over the world and welcomed them into the Presto® community. Presto® was on a path of increasing growth and success, in large part because of the contributions from developers across many fields and all over the world.
Unfortunately in 2018, it became clear that Facebook management wanted to have tighter control over the project and its future. This culminated with their decision to grant Facebook developers commit rights on the project without any prior experience in Presto®. We strongly believe that this kind of decision is not compatible with having a healthy, open community. Moreover, they made this decision by fiat without engaging the Presto® community. As a matter of principle, we had no choice but to leave Facebook in order to focus on making sure Presto® continued to be a successful project with an open, collaborative and independent community. In reality, the choice was easy.
We started the Presto Software Foundation in January 2019 as an independent entity to oversee the development of the software and community, continuing the meritocratic system that had been in place over the previous 6 years. The community quickly consolidated under this new home. We intentionally stayed unemployed over the next 10 months to focus on expanding and strengthening the community by working directly with major users and contributors, as well as reaching out to a wider group of users and developers across the globe. This resulted in new use cases and an injection of energy, making the project more vibrant than ever before as even more new users and developers became engaged. But, don’t take our word for it, let the data speak for itself:
Months after this consolidation, Facebook decided to create a competing community using The Linux Foundation®. As a first action, Facebook applied for a trademark on Presto®. This was a surprising, norm-breaking move because up until that point, the Presto® name had been used without constraints by commercial and non-commercial products for over 6 years. In September of 2019, Facebook established the Presto Foundation at The Linux Foundation®, and immediately began working to enforce this new trademark. We spent the better part of the last year trying to agree to terms with Facebook and The Linux Foundation that would not negatively impact the community, but unfortunately we were unable to do so. The end result is that we must now change the name in a short period of time, with little ability to minimize user disruption.
On a personal note, and as the founders who named the project Presto® in the first place, this is an incredibly sad and disappointing turn of events. And while we will always have fondness for the name Presto®, we have come to accept that a name is just a name. To be frank, we’re tired of this endless distraction, and we intend to focus on what matters most and what we are best at doing – building high quality software everyone can rely on and fostering a healthy community of users and developers that build it and support it. We’re not going anywhere – we’re the same people, the same amazing software, under a new name: Trino.
If you love this project, you already love Trino. ❤️
Facebook is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc. The Linux Foundation and Presto are trademarks of The Linux Foundation.