10gen is now MongoDB, Inc. | Hacker News Reader

10gen is now MongoDB, Inc.

mongodb.com

110 pointslarvaetron38 comments

Far more interesting blog post by their CEO here:

http://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/whats-name

I'd love to know the rationale for this and especially how they will enforce their trademark. In particular, I've heard that open source projects named after their company find their trademark hard to enforce, and trademark enforcement sometimes causes a new name for the "community edition" of their products.

This is a little different though, as the company is named after the product now.. I don't know of any for-profit companies that have done this but the Blender Foundation has gotten on just fine.

Not a lawyer, but if the software project had an independent owner for its trademark, I believe that they'd have a case against 10gen. The name is deliberately chosen to provoke confusion between the two.

The MongoDB project was started by 10gen. I would be surprised if someone else owned the trademark.

So the new name is not so much deliberately chosen to provoke confusion as it is to reduce confusion.

Their previous full name was "10gen: the MongoDB Company"; they've been trying to dispel confusion over the company name vs. product for a long time (probably since they pivoted towards making Mongo the main business product - 10gen started as a PaaS company).

source: worked there

Edit: the title of this submission should really be "10gen: the MongoDB Company shortens their name to MongoDB, Inc." Less attention-grabby, more truthy.

Actually, Blackberry Ltd did this very recently (used to be called Research in Motion)

I think the reference was to companies supporting open source projects.

Yep, trademark law is different from other types of IP - unless you can show you've continually defended a trademark, you can lose the rights to it. However it's not always handled the same way:

- Red Hat asked people to rename unofficial RHL distributions something like Pink Tie back in the day, and the tradition continued with CentOS and the like.

- Firefox has a different tack, and just makes sure people sign up to meet certain specs to be able to use the trademark. That might mean not diverting from upstream too much (eg, Debian wanted FF to use Linux FHS standard, FF upstream didn't do that, hence Iceweasel).

Not a lawyer etc.

Iceweasel is called like it is called because (roughly):

* The firefox branding itself is non-free, which is unacceptable for debian * The replaced the branding, but kept the name first * Mozilla complained and clarified that a program called "Firefox" has to bear the official logo

Detailed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...

Which struck many as funny since the Debian trademark has similar restrictions on usage.

Ack re: Firefox branding. However the FHS stuff was also part of it - see post from a Mozillian here: http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=211

Makes sense, but does it confuse the for profit and non-profit?

This is a smart move if they intend to really focus on just MongoDB. For a company that wants to ship more than a product in the same area to have an "upper level" brand makes more sense IMHO.

I don't see it hurting Oracle that much.

The can just name their new products "MongoDB this" and "MongoBD that".

And 10gen wasn't much of a brand name to begin with. Very few people knew it or remembered what it was, whereas tons have heard of "MongoDB".

Oracle? =)

Initially I had the same thought as the parent post, but this is a good point. No one ever really heard about 10gen; it was always MongoDB. Their events were always Mongo titled (MongoDB Days) and even their emails are @mongodb.com. In a way it was already their primary brand, might as well make it official.

In other news, all documents pertaining to the name change have disappeared after being stored away in a MongoDB cluster.

I’ll probably buy a support subscription sooner or later. Feels nicer to buy it from MongoDB "itself" than from some unknown 10gen :-) Psychology is a strange beast.

I would hazard to say that a support contract is essential if you plan on using MongoDB at any sort of scale. I speak from vast experience.

In Norwegian, "Mongo" is a (ugly) slang word that means the same as "retarded".

Also an amusing blog post from the CTO: http://blog.mongodb.org/post/59489943730/todays-news

Should have take a play from Snoop and gone with MongoLion.

i am surprised they didnt just go for mongo i notice they already own mongo.com

because mongo is an offensive word in a lot of countries

then so should be the word mongoDB

really - which ones? (just curious)

Sweden for example, I think it's slang for people with Down's syndrome there or something.

It's offensive in Sweden.

In spanish is a synonym for stupid, subnormal, idiot...

Italy as well.

It's very offensive in German.

So how does that affect its usage in Germany? It's hard to imagine English speaking companies being comfortable with using, say, RetardDB.

Yes, mongo as in Mongoloid (Down's syndrome, not the race) is offensive in mostly English speaking, Caucasian contexts. However, I'd figure MongoDB becoming a well known term would break some of the offensiveness associated with the pejorative use of mongo. At the same time, I don't think anyone keen on MongoDB will be thinking of the pejoratives associated with some part of the name.

I found it odd (not wrong, just unusual) that an open source project would purchase ad promotions like promoted tweets, rather than the company itself. This may be a move to make things like this less awkward.

There's a notion that companies named after their open source project are more likely to succeed commercially than those that are not. So from that perspective, good for MongoDB. Of course I can come up with a number of counter examples....

I don't think it's confined to just open source projects.

E.G. RIM is now BlackBerry Ltd. There are a many reasons why this is the case, but chief among them is that usually the product outpaces the clout of the company/organization (for better or for worse). When that happens, it does make some sense to adopt the product name.

This is great, I'm tired of typing tengen instead of 10gen into the search bar...

Sort of like RIM -> BlackBerry.

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