We’re Rebranding PrestoSQL as Trino

I think it's important to contextualise this a bit better.

Facebook supported Presto since 2012, as per the article. FB are also a fast growing company, and the likelihood is that many of the people who really appreciate how transformative and important Presto was are mostly gone now (perhaps lying on a bed made from dollar bills).

It appears (again from the article) that crummy management/directors appear to want to maintain too much control over Presto (hilariously enough, FB actually stopped using open source Hive as the open committers kept introducing things that broke their workloads).

Therefore, the founders have made a company and changed the name. This could easily be a MySQL vs MariaDB situation, post Oracle acquisition.

I'd say the Linux foundation probably support any of their sponsors desires, much like other advocacy organisations.

manigandham 5 years ago | |

The name should've been changed regardless. The comments here seem misguided as there is clearly a lot of confusion between Facebook's prestodb and the fork called prestosql in the community.

that_guy_iain 5 years ago | |

How would they be abusing the trademark law? They officially started using the trademark first, the fork then wanted to take advantage of the brand from Facebook’s product(open source or not). The fact forkers were originally Facebook engineers who started the project and came up with the name doesn’t remove the fact Facebook invested in this project and built the trademark. This appears to be what the trademark law is there to do and that this is use of trademark law for it's intended purpose.

findepi 5 years ago | | |

The name was not trademarked when PrestoSQL was born.

glogla 5 years ago | | |

Yes, Facebook deciding to register the trademark a year later is the scummy part. The trademark is of course useless - it's not like they sell Presto - it is just petty bullshit to fuck Starburst and the community over.

And of course, everyone is having to put up with it, since Facebook has unlimited money and this can't lose any legal battle, even over ridiculous retrospective trademark for open source software.

manigandham 5 years ago | | |

It's not petty, there is clear confusion in the community between prestodb and the fork called prestosql, which also continued to call itself the "official presto" all this time.

Forks like this should really use a different name from the outset when the existing project is still alive with a large user base.

that_guy_iain 5 years ago | | |

The trademark belongs to the Linux Foundation as far as I can tell (from the blog). The trademark being registered is standard open source protection move to stop other projects creating confusion with your open source project.

Facebook's involement here is that they funded the original development and then donated the project to the Linux Foundation.

The scummy part forking a project and creating a name that is clearly designed to make the fork to look like the original project. If Facebook did what they did when they named their porject the community would be up in arms about it.

that_guy_iain 5 years ago | | |

They didn't trademark PrestoSQL, they trademarked their name. It's just PrestoSQL infringes on that trademark because trademarks are designed to stop what they were doing.