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Comment by lostintangent | Hacker News Reader

We (the GitHub Next team) use and love Apache Spark. So we made sure to connect with ASF before releasing GitHub Spark, and confirm they were comfortable with us using this name.

We felt like there was sufficient difference between the two products, that there wouldn’t be any confusion. Especially with the target audience that GitHub Spark ultimately intends to reach.

That said, we plan to validate this during the Technical Preview phase. Since we absolutely want to be respectful of Apache Spark, and its impact on software.

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The GitHub Next team sounds more like a department than a team. It also sounded odd to hear that a group of that size uses and loves something that is unlikely to be used by a large percentage of the team directly. Yay corporate motivational speak! I can use another look at https://despair.com/collections/demotivators after this.

When GitHub Next asked for this, there was already pressure in place for ASF to give that to them, because they're locked into GitHub, so it may not have been given entirely freely. You can say that you're confident it was, but to me it seems impossible to know for sure. I don't know if it was or not. It might be that they would have decided to give it freely but the thought of their relationship with GitHub came to mind while they were considering it. In any case, it's a big ask, because if this takes off, soon the phrase Spark Application that another commenter mentioned will be ambiguous.

Out of curiosity: what size do you think constitutes a “team” vs. a “department”?

GitHub Next is 18 people (inclusive of all roles), which seems appropriately-sized to be called a “team” (certainly in a large engineering company).

But apologies if that came off as misleading.

With more than 10, I tend to prefer the term department, though the term department could also be used for an organizational division with a smaller number of people.

The way Cloudflare has Departments on their jobs page fits my mental model of it. One is Emerging Technology and Incubation which sounds similar to GitHub Next. https://www.cloudflare.com/careers/jobs/?department=Emerging...

On the GitHub jobs page, there isn't such a selection, but in autocomplete there are two results for team and none for department or group: https://www.github.careers/careers-home/jobs

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