[HN Gopher] Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do...
___________________________________________________________________
Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the
community
Author : electrum
Score : 95 points
Date : 2022-08-02 20:16 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (trino.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (trino.io)
| password4321 wrote:
| TIL or xkcd.com/1053 "lucky 10,000'd":
|
| > _Presto, a distributed SQL query engine for big data analytics_
|
| > _we were forced to rebrand and changed the name to Trino_
| bitsondatadev wrote:
| I'm curious to know if this is anyone's first time hearing about
| Trino?
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| I've never heard of it. Im not a programmer, though I read
| hacker news daily.
| biztos wrote:
| I had heard of Presto, vaguely, but not Trino.
|
| It's certainly an interesting choice of name!
|
| Should you say "TRY-no" to rhyme with Rhino or "TREE-no" to
| rhyme with Arduino?
|
| I would do the latter, but I'm a debauched expat. My guess is
| that half the people in America will do the former.
|
| Because I overthink this stuff I had to go see what's on
| trino.com and it's an impressively old-school unfinished
| personal website.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Not trino, but yes for Presto. But it was already confusing
| because there are/were two Presto projects with one being a
| fork of the other?
| bawolff wrote:
| Not to mention the name of the opera rendering engine.
| bitsondatadev wrote:
| Yeah, I think that was one of the reasons why Facebook
| enforcing the trademark ended up being a blessing in
| disguise. It at least made the forks clearer. Now Trino is
| gaining more momentum but it takes a while for the brand
| recognition to set in I suppose.
| biztos wrote:
| > Engineers at these highly competitive companies must create
| memorable work, or they will not get the promotions they deserve.
|
| If everybody gets promoted because of "memorable" work, maybe
| nobody actually deserves the promotions, and they're just handed
| out at the whim of whoever remembers your work?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think memorable just means that there is some artefact of the
| work, eg some thing in the user interface or some committed
| code or report or whatever.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| _" 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| There's code review, and there's "code review" where there's a
| deadline and someone says "can you click approve on this real
| quick," which is essentially a direct contribution with a
| compliance dance. I've seen it at large companies like these on
| several occasions.
| dsundstrom wrote:
| We ran Presto directly on Github (I think it still does), so
| everything went directly to the project without a private
| internal review first. We designed it this way, so that
| everyone in the community could participate in the full
| process.
| bitsondatadev wrote:
| 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.
| radicality wrote:
| I spent many years at FB, but no longer there, but that
| doesn't even sound like a 'special case'? Every engineer at
| Fb has access to pretty much all the code, and after an
| internal code review for your code change, you can get it
| committed to the internal repos. For open source things,
| something syncs the external and internal changes ocassionaly
| I think. I imagine the problem here was that now external
| people can't comment on internal PRs etc.
|
| I even remember some of my internal commits making it into
| FBs open source code on GitHub, even though at the time I had
| no idea that this specific area of FBs codebase is open
| source.
| billjings wrote:
| I worked at FB, too, and I can confirm you speak the truth.
|
| This process is problematic, though. The "special case" is
| the standard process at FB: to make external contributors
| second class citizens.
|
| They have their reasons, but doing this pushes the locus of
| discussion and action to the place where work happens
| fastest: inside the company. That means that the interests
| of FB engineers drive the project; in other words, not
| open.
|
| That argument is I'm sure open to some logical nitpicking.
| But the evidence speaks for itself: Facebook open source
| projects aren't responsive to the outside community, and
| they language when FB's priorities shift. So their strategy
| has been pennywise, pound foolish in my view: they get the
| short term benefits of an "open" project, but they're
| incapable of actually being good open source custodians.
| kmonsen wrote:
| Facebook/Meta does not have owners, so any two people in the
| company can land a change.
| ruler88 wrote:
| why did Presto got renamed to Trino? so confusing...
| neilv wrote:
| 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!"
| dsundstrom wrote:
| If only it were that easy. It took ages to find the new name.
| There is a Google doc somewhere with pages of bad names.
| bitsondatadev wrote:
| Hah! It may have very well looked like that given the time
| constraints they were working with.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| This is answered in the linked article.
| bitsondatadev wrote:
| Here's the renaming article that clarifies this...
|
| https://trino.io/blog/2020/12/27/announcing-trino.html
|
| Months after this consolidation, Facebook decided to create a
| competing community using The Linux Foundation(r). As a first
| action, Facebook applied for a trademark on Presto(r). This was
| a surprising, norm-breaking move because up until that point,
| the Presto(r) 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(r), 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.
| nineinchnick wrote:
| I love seeing there are people dedicated to keeping open-source
| projects like Trino alive, ready to make some hard decisions.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-02 23:00 UTC)