10gen is now MongoDB, Inc.

http://www.mongodb.com/press/10gen-announces-company-name-change-mongodb-inc

by larvaetron • 13 years ago

110 38 13 years ago

maxdemarzi• 13 years ago

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

clarkevans• 13 years ago

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.

skyebook• 13 years ago

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.

kingkilr• 13 years ago

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.

nonchalance• 13 years ago

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

nailer2• 13 years ago

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.

Argorak• 13 years ago

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...

mathattack• 13 years ago

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

williwu• 13 years ago

Sort of like RIM -> BlackBerry.

kirab• 13 years ago

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.

nasalgoat• 13 years ago

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.

antirez2• 13 years ago

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.

coldtea• 13 years ago

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".

functional_test• 13 years ago

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.

systems• 13 years ago

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

christkv• 13 years ago

because mongo is an offensive word in a lot of countries

z92• 13 years ago

then so should be the word mongoDB

outside1234• 13 years ago

really - which ones? (just curious)

kinleyd• 13 years ago

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.

cdibona• 13 years ago

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....

eksith• 13 years ago

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.

fritzy• 13 years ago

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.

mcgwiz• 13 years ago

Far more interesting blog post by their CEO here:

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

Quai• 13 years ago

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

toblender• 13 years ago

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

ranman• 13 years ago

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

hyc_symas• 13 years ago

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

10gen is now MongoDB, Inc.

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