Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

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.

Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#6

Post by bitsondatadev » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 9:45 PM UTC

I'm curious to know if this is anyone's first time hearing about Trino?

Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#7

Post by cmrdporcupine » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 9:47 PM UTC

"Feedback from these engineers ultimately culminated in the managers making the decision to give automatic contributor rights to any Facebook engineer working on Presto, so that these engineers could move faster."

I'm confused -- does Facebook not have similar code review infrastructure as Google, etc. That is: nothing -- I mean nothing -- gets "contributed" at Google without it going through code review.

Were FB engineers able to commit directly without review? Or is it that they were given some kind of "owners" privilege to fast track reviews? This all sounds bad.

Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#8

Post by neilv » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 9:48 PM UTC

ruler88 wrote: post #3

why did Presto got renamed to Trino? so confusing...

According to https://trino.io/blog/2020/12/27/announcing-trino.html , because of trademark registration and enforcement by Facebook.

(IMHO, PrestoSQL also looked maybe a little too much like PostgreSQL in this space.)

I'm imagining an unusually efficient brandstorming session. "OK, folks, idea hats on, there are no bad ideas... we've got Presto..." "Uh... new Presto... New-o..." "Neutrino..." "Trino?" "Trino!" "Searching it now!"

Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#9

Post by thatguy0900 » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 9:49 PM UTC

bitsondatadev wrote: post #6

I'm curious to know if this is anyone's first time hearing about Trino?

I've never heard of it. Im not a programmer, though I read hacker news daily.

Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#10

Post by bitsondatadev » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #7

"Feedback from these engineers ultimately culminated in the managers making the decision to give automatic contributor rights to any Facebook engineer working on Presto, so that these engineers could move faster." I'm confused -- does Facebook not have similar code review infrastructure as Google, etc. That is: nothing -- I mean nothing -- gets "contributed" at Google without it going through code review. Were FB eng…

Facebook has their own internal reviews for their own internal projects and forks of open source projects. I think the issue came down to Facebook adding anyone working on the project to have the ability to merge code to the open source project.

Typically if a company wants to contribute to open source, you have to create a PR and have it be reviewed and merged by the maintainers of the open source project on top of internal review. Facebook management decided to circumvent that process.