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Presto Foundation

The Linux Foundation’s home for Presto, the SQL query engine built at Facebook: it owns the name and spends member dues, while a nine-seat steering committee runs the code.

1 projects in this catalogPart of the Linux FoundationWebsite

What it is

The Presto Foundation is part of the non-profit Linux Foundation. Facebook, Alibaba, Twitter and Uber launched it on September 23, 2019, and Facebook, where Presto was built in 2012, moved the project under “a community governance model with representation from each of the founding members”. It hosts one project, Presto, also called PrestoDB, and the name is a registered trademark of LF Projects, LLC. Member dues pay for tooling, infrastructure and community conferences such as PrestoCon. Members must also belong to the Linux Foundation: Executive Premier membership costs $90,000 a year and Premier $15,000 on top of LF dues, and both kinds appoint a representative to the Governing Board, while Associate membership is free for qualifying LF Associate members.

The membership has shrunk. The foundation’s landscape listed 11 members in October 2021, including Alibaba, Alluxio, Intel, LinkedIn, Starburst and Twitter. In October 2026 it listed four: IBM, the only Executive Premier member, and Denodo, Meta and Uber at Premier level. Twitter and Starburst dropped off the list in February 2023, Alibaba in July 2024 and Intel in February 2026.

For someone choosing a technology, the badge means Presto’s name and governance don’t belong to one company and its code is under Apache 2.0, but development is still concentrated: in October 2026 the nine voting members of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) worked at Meta (three), IBM (two), Microsoft (two), Pinterest and Uber. The badge doesn’t cover Trino, the fork by Presto’s creators, which has its own Trino Software Foundation, or Velox, the C++ library behind Presto’s native workers, which Meta hosts in its facebookincubator GitHub organisation. There are no maturity stages.

Its projects in this catalog

Presto (PrestoDB)Open sourceFacebook’s distributed SQL engine, now governed by the Linux Foundation, moving its workers from Java to C++ on Velox. Trino is its 2019 fork.

In depth

Who decides#

The foundation has two governing bodies. The Governing Board, made up of representatives of the paying members, manages the money: it allocates dues and runs outreach such as PrestoCon and meetups, and in the words of its chair in 2020 it “generally stays clear of the technical aspects of the Presto project”. Those belong to the TSC and the project’s committers.

The TSC works under a technical charter adopted on September 16, 2019 and last amended on November 6, 2020, which makes it responsible for “all technical oversight” of the project: technical direction, releases, sub-projects, committers and security policy. Any contributor can become a committer by a majority vote of the TSC, and a voting member can nominate a committer for a TSC seat. Since 2023 the TSC has had nine seats with one-year terms; seven of the members in October 2026 had held their seats since May 21, 2024, and two joined on September 17, 2026. It tries to decide by consensus; when it votes, half the voting members make a quorum and a simple majority of those present carries, and a deadlock can be referred to the Governing Board.

Since August 2023 much of the technical work has been organised in working groups, each with a leader who calls meetings and helps set a roadmap. The TSC repository lists six: architecture, optimizer, native worker, security, conformance and community support. TSC meetings are open to anyone, and every contributor has to sign the Presto contributor licence agreement.

Presto, PrestoSQL and Trino#

Two projects descend from the Presto that Facebook open-sourced in 2013. According to Presto’s creators, Martin Traverso, Dain Sundstrom and David Phillips, Facebook’s management wanted tighter control over the project in 2018, so they left and carried on their version as PrestoSQL, under an independent Presto Software Foundation they set up in January 2019. Facebook applied for a trademark on Presto, set up the Presto Foundation at the Linux Foundation that September and, in their account, immediately began to enforce the trademark. In December 2020 PrestoSQL was renamed Trino.

Since the split, Presto has gained C++ workers built on Velox and Presto on Spark for very large jobs. Starburst, the main company behind Trino, was itself listed as a Presto Foundation member until February 2023.

Where it came from2012–2026

Presto was started at Facebook in 2012 and open-sourced in November 2013. By 2019, Facebook said, more than a thousand of its employees used it, running several million queries and processing petabytes of data a day. Other large users kept their own changes: the foundation’s first principle says many capabilities and connectors built in the community “haven’t made their way back into the repo”.

Facebook, Alibaba, Twitter and Uber launched the foundation on September 23, 2019. By December its Governing Board had ratified three guiding principles, including that “no one individual or company is greater than the project”, and goals for 2020 that started with unifying Presto under one neutral community. The first PrestoCon, a virtual event run by the Linux Foundation, took place in September 2020; Intel and Upsolver joined that autumn, and by October 2021 the landscape listed 11 members.

In April 2023 IBM bought Ahana, a startup selling managed Presto that had four committers and two TSC members, and took over its membership; Denodo joined in June. Meanwhile other members fell away, and by October 2026 four were left, with Meta, IBM and Uber providing most of the TSC.

Why it’s built this way

Give the name to the Linux Foundation
Presto had been Facebook’s project. A neutral owner was meant to let Uber, Twitter, Alibaba and others contribute as equals and bring their own changes back into one repository.
Members fund, committers decide
Paying members sit on the Governing Board and decide how dues are spent, but the technical charter gives all technical oversight to a TSC drawn from the project’s committers, which any contributor can become.
Working groups for each area
The TSC chair said newcomers found it hard to know whom to ask about large ongoing work, so in 2023 the project split it into groups with leaders and their own roadmaps.

Timeline

  1. 2012

    Presto started at Facebook

  2. 2013

    Open-sourced in November

  3. 2019

    Presto Foundation launched on September 23 by Facebook, Alibaba, Twitter and Uber

  4. 2020

    First PrestoCon in September; Intel and Upsolver join; PrestoSQL renamed Trino in December

  5. 2021

    Membership reaches 11 on the foundation’s landscape, its peak, in October

  6. 2023

    IBM joins by buying Ahana in April; Denodo joins in June; working groups start in August

  7. 2026

    Four members left after Intel drops off the list in February; two new TSC members in September

Sources · facts checked 2026-10-28

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