Hacker News Reader

Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

It is not. The naming resemblance is strictly coincidental :)

Well I for one think that it's not really "cool" to just copy the name for more or less the same thing.

BTW, it also appears there is an active US trademark (#78010053) for "centrifuge" in the computer database context. Isn't that an issue, too?

By coincidental, I mean that no copying was intended. It was strictly an accident.

Ah ok; I have made a habit of typing "<name> {software,github}" into google as well as the WIPO trademark search when picking a name for a new project.

I started doing that after having to go through two iterations of renaming a project after finding out the old name was somehow encumbered... of course after we had already used it in front of other people; it was very embarrassing.

Honestly, I don't think any of us had heard of this other project when we coined the name internally. If someone had raised it up the flagpole, we certainly would have considered it.

Still, do keep in mind that it's not the name of a product offering - it's solely an internal name for the technology.

That’s correct, we were multiple months into the project and already using it in production when I came across (the other) centrifuge. We chose to just go with it because it wasn’t worth changing all the code and everyone’s habit of referring to centrifuge with this name.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com