stevenmih

Disclaimer: Cofounder/CEO of Ahana here, which provides a managed service of open source PrestoDB for fast, reliable SQL Lakehouses and analytics.

I wanted to add nuance to the conversation: While most open source projects these days are licensed with Apache 2.0, there are two categories that projects fall into: community-controlled and vendor-controlled. The difference is the control. If a project is governed by a gold-standard hosting organization like the Linux Foundation and have organizationally diverse committers, then it's community controlled and open forever. However if the project is mostly owned by one company then it's easy to move to a non-compete license. For example, Linux Foundation hosts Presto and the license cannot be changed to a non-compete. This is guaranteed by the Linux Foundation charter. The fork of Presto (named Trino) however, turned into a company controlled open source project. In my experience, the distinctions between open forever vs. possibly more closed with a non-competitive license tends to be overlooked in choosing which to use.

I commend Sid on his efforts to keep open source, open forever. Donating your project to Linux Foundation like Facebook/Meta did with Presto is one path to achieving that, this new approach is another. Bravo!

Just a clarification about "fb presto", there isn't a "fb presto", its Linux Foundation Presto, which has its own unique innovations and used reliably at all scales, including places like Meta, Uber, Alibaba, and more recently ByteDance. Linux Foundation Presto isn't controlled by one vendor, it has 10 member orgs overseeing the project, following Linux project practices, and doing community outreach like PrestoCon. See for yourself @ prestodb.io (Disclaimer: I'm Ahana CEO, providing a Cloud Managed Service for Presto-based SQL Lakehouses, and member of Linux Foundation's Presto Foundation)

Steven here, I'm Ahana CEO (Managed Service for Presto) and member of Linux Foundation's Presto Foundation Since you asked about an alternative to AWS Athena, we offer a free-forever in-VPC Managed Service for Presto on AWS, which keeps up with the latest Presto releases.

Note: the original Presto continues to run in production at Meta (fmr. Facebook), Uber, and recently ByteDance TikTok data platform talked about running 1M queries a day with tens of thousands of cores. Some reasons to stay with Presto: - Reliability and scalability per above - Cutting edge innovations only in later versions of Presto: multi-level caching (project RaptorX) to boost query performance by 10X+ and table scan improvements (project Aria) to name a few - Only PrestoDB is hosted by Linux Foundation, giving confidence to community users that future releases will remain open.