A street in Trino, Italy. Trino is the new name of the forked Presto. Source: wikimedia.org, License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

In May 2020 I wrote about the philosophical problem, “The Ship of Theseus” with a case study on the Free/Open Source software project, Presto.

In brief, the discussion was about two softwares named Presto both claiming to be the original Presto. One group, Facebook, claimed they were custodians because that’s where Presto was founded; the other group, PSF, claimed they were the true custodians because they were the developers who originally came up with the idea and wrote the software. So, who’s the real Presto?

In the epilogue of my post, I said, “The Facebook Presto is Presto and PSF is a fork.”

True to form, two days ago, PSF’s Martin Traverso announced, “We wanted to let you know we’re rebranding PrestoSQL as Trino.” [ref]

How’d this happen? Simple. Facebook applied for a trademark on the name “Presto” and were awarded the same by the USPTO. It is now Presto®.

In other words, I’m right. I’m always right, but sometimes I’m more right than other times. — Linus Torvalds, git mailing list, 2005 Apr 15.