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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

The book is on Lulu [1] and there is an Information Week article [2] on the issue. I would be pretty ticked if Google (a web search company) stomped on my work. It just seems like a really cruddy thing to do. It's in the logic / agent group of languages and I have run across the article a couple of times but it is my no means famous. It is not like Google's Go is super well known either, so picking a new name that could be googled would probably be the kind thing to do.

[1] http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/lets-go/705004

[2] http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/web_services/sh...

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Flip side:

If someone takes out a patent and has a tiny, fringe or effectively nonexistent business around actually performing the patent, but sues anyone who independently comes up with the same idea, we call that person a "troll".

If someone chooses a name for a project and builds a tiny, fringe or effectively nonexistent community around it, but complains about anyone who independently tries to use the same name, we curse his vile oppressors.

(Is there just a bit of a difference between this situation and a patent troll? Yes. Is the difference small enough that you can see there from here? Yes. Should people be thinking pretty hard about what precedents they want in this type of situation? You bet your ass they should.)

You liken it to a patent but it is more similar to a trademark. I would think most everyone agrees trademarks are very good things in practice 99.9% of the time.

That's because if you don't use your trademark, you lose it. There's no equivalent to "Oh, I used the name in a little-known paper I wrote and now I can sue you." If nobody knows about your trademark, you probably don't own it.

Technically it isn't the lack of use that will kill a trademark, it is the lack of defense or people using it as a generic term. The need to defend actually causes most of the trouble with trademarks since you really need to be a little more agressive than you would like.

The term "patent troll" is most commonly used when someone doesn't have a product and sues others for infringement on the patent. If someone was producing a product based on the patent they are using it and not really trolling, just following the intended function of the patent.

I think likening this person's work to a "patent troll" situation is kind of disrespectful. I get the feeling that he just wished Google had done a search and left him alone.

I think likening this person's work to a "patent troll" situation is kind of disrespectful.

The thing with project names is that they're used by definition. To draw a better analogy from trademark law, the standard is not "is the name in use", but whether use of the name for something new would cause confusion. In this case, the overwhelming majority of material on the original "Go" consists of articles complaining about the name conflict. The actual community around it seems to consist of the guy who came up with it, and so few other people as to be effectively nonexistent. Thus, what is the likelihood of actual confusion occurring?

Which gets me back to the question I wanted people to think about: what level of use of a project name should qualify for "nobody else gets to use this"? If anything anyone's ever used -- regardless of how much notoriety or traction they gained in doing so -- is off-limits, we're going to have to resort to random strings of characters pretty soon, and start moving our way up through the Unicode planes as we do so :)

- Go! does not have its own web site, and is only available for download from a very old binary on the author's mac.com hosting account.

- Go! didn't have a wikipedia page until it was hastily created after Go was launched.

- Go! didn't have a wikipedia page until it was hastily created after Go was launched.

Tarsnap doesn't have a wikipedia page either, but I'd be rather irritated if someone else created an online backup service and called it "tarsnap".

The existence of a wikipedia page is a very poor way of adjudicating notability.

In the wikipedia world, there is a bit of a difference between a programming language (Go!) and a company (Tarsnap) in the likelihood of it having a page. I think the threshold for a company would be higher in wikipedia.

The existence of a wikipedia page is a very poor way of adjudicating notability.

Especially since being notable is one of the requirements for inclusion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

Assuming Wikipedia actually performs this duty, that makes it a good way to answer the question of notability (as long as the investigating party is not an agent of Wikipedia, which creates an infinite recursion). If Wikipedia only runs notable things, you use Wikipedia to prescreen notability for you.

Theoretically being in Wikipedia implies notability; but not being in Wikipedia does not imply non-notability, only that nobody got around to creating a page yet.

Which is why we have pages like "List of recurring characters from Sonic the Hedgehog", naturally - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recurring_characters_fr... .

At best, wikipedia editors may collect evidence for notability, but neither presence nor absence of a wikipedia page alone makes a strong case.

Notability is why we do have a page for them, instead of a page for each of them.

> The existence of a wikipedia page is a very poor way of adjudicating notability.

I agree, but as one of the only pages on the net that talk about Go! today (outside of this naming dispute) its creation date is of relevance here.

I hardly think this qualifies as stomping on his work.

Not to mention that a lot of people would have never heard of his language if Google didn't come out with their own Go.

They could've showed courtesy and it's a stupid name anyway.

And you don't need to hear about it, that's what search engines are for.

> I hardly think this qualifies as stomping on his work.

He created a programming language called Go, worked on it for 10 years, published papers and books on the subject, a team from Google creates a programming language, calls it Go, and essentially tells him to go fuck himself when he points it out.

I do think it qualifies.

> Not to mention that a lot of people would have never heard of his language if Google didn't come out with their own Go.

Oh then I guess that makes it ok. Thanks everybody, ethics are irrelevant, please move along the show is over.

In any case, it's now pretty certain nobody will ever hear of his language ever again.

He created a programming language called Go, worked on it for 10 years, published papers and books on the subject

Yes, he worked hard. That is unfortunately completely irrelevant. His language is not widely used and was largely a one-man operation. So it didn't get much notice.

a team from Google creates a programming language, calls it Go, and essentially tells him to go fuck himself when he points it out.

Changing the name costs time/money and Google was already using Go in a bunch of places internally when they released it. They decided it wasn't worth it. And 'go' is one of the most common words in the English language. The guy didn't trademark it. Tough luck.

Oh then I guess that makes it ok.

Well that's not what I meant but it was probably a dick move for me to imply he had other motives when complaining about Go. Go! didn't even have a Wikipedia page until after Google released Go.

This was not related to my original criticism of they OPs hyperbole, just an added point. Google's naming collision is the best thing that could have happened to Go!

" Google's naming collision is the best thing that could have happened to Go!"

Up until the point he submits another paper to a conference / journal. It might not be a real smooth vetting process.

Maybe introducing the name like "The language formerly known as Go!" would help?

If Google hadn't named their language "Go" I probably never would have heard of his language to begin with.

Personally "Go!" and "Google Go" are different enough to me that I wouldn't have trouble differentiating. I don't have trouble differentiating Digital Mars D and Dtrace D, either.

Actually, as a non-user of both, I didn't know there was a difference; until your comment, I though Sun had used the other D for dtrace. I know the difference between Java and Javascript, but even those languages' names continue to confuse people (usually non-programmers). Not to stomp on Go!, but one significant difference here is that both Java and Javascript have wide user-bases.

I believe Firefox went through two name-changes after the project's initial kick-off, but the Mozilla Foundation is hardly a 900-pound gorilla. This kind of sucks for Go!'s creator (and was a bit sloppy for Google Go's creators), but it's hard to tell Google where to sit.

I initially read this as "I would be pretty tickled if Google (a web search company) stomped on my work." And that made a lot of sense to me.

If I had a really obscure project that I was proud of, and Google came along and made a project with a similar name, and the result was that many thousands of people became aware of my project, I would indeed be tickled.

"It is not like Google's Go is super well known either"

No.. but it's coming up fast:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

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