Presto, the open source distributed SQL query engine, will now be hosted under the Linux Foundation. The newly-established Presto Foundation will have an open neutral governance model, enabling Presto to scale and diversify its community.

Founding members Facebook, Alibaba, Twitter and Uber will use the foundation to enable contributors to drive the future direction of the project. The move is expected to help Presto become the fastest and most reliable SQL engine for massively distributed data processing.

Presto Foundation will have representation from each of the founding members. With this, Facebook will be collaborating with the broader ecosystem of users and contributors as one voice in the future of the Foundation.

Presto was developed at Facebook in 2012 as a high performance distributed SQL query engine for large scale data analytics. Presto’s architecture allows users to query a variety of data sources such as Hadoop, S3, Alluxio, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Kafka, MongoDB and move at scale and speed.

After creating Presto, Facebook open sourced it to other companies. The idea was to check whether other companies were having the same issues and wanted to collaborate. “It turns out many other companies were interested and so under The Linux Foundation, we believe the project can engage others and grow the community for the benefit of all,” said Kathy Kam, Head of Open Source at Facebook.