[that_guy_iain]

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]

The name was not trademarked when PrestoSQL was born.

[glogla]

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]

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]

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]

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.