"I have already used the name Go for MY programming language"

http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=9

by archon810 • 17 years ago

148 93 17 years ago

code.google.com

mkinsella• 17 years ago

Nothing will come of this. There are no legal ramifications for not changing the name and would only confuse people.

rjurney2• 17 years ago

Its dickish to not change the name. Its kind of evil. Google isn't supposed to do that. So maybe they'll change it? I would.

andrewljohnson3• 17 years ago

You certainly sound like a lawyer, but your profile says you are not.

Why do you think there are no legal ramifications? Same name, same domain... you'd have to be a lawyer to really know if there was a case to be made, right?

cookiecaper2• 17 years ago

It'd be better to do it now and leave this little dude alone than to continue the ambiguity. Google's Go is only a day old, not too much to lose if they change the name now.

Also, maybe math guy has some money, or will find some money, and litigate, as he's already expressed his displeasure at the collision.

I think it's best for everyone if Google just man up and make the change now. In the end it will only generate more publicity for both Gos, and everyone will be happy, and the threat of unpleasant ramifications (including bad PR and possible litigation) vanishes. Fingers crossed that Google will do it, though I doubt they will.

manish• 17 years ago

Will google be fair to the fmccabe?

Kaizyn• 17 years ago

Google will likely claim that Go! and Go are different names for a programming language much as C and C# are.

hhjj• 17 years ago

That's not what their search engine tell me.

johnthedebs• 17 years ago

I'm asking myself that question, and I really don't know what to expect from Google.

It's interesting to see what happens when namespaces clash in real life.

imp• 17 years ago

My guess is the second declaration overrides the first.

caffeine• 17 years ago

This right on the heels of Clo[js]ure ...

Hey, Google, you can't have all the good names, you know.

pbhjpbhj2• 17 years ago

That's what the trademark system is for. If you create a programming language and don't want someone else to use the same name then register the trademark - yes that costs money (quite a bit for an individual), but then it should to stop people just registering names and squatting them.

Of course "go" is probably too generic/descriptive to be a trademark ...

kls• 17 years ago

As much as I hate to defend copyright and trademarks, if the creator of go! did not trademark the name, then the responsibility lies with him. If one where to try to avoid the name of every pet project out there, it would be nearly impossible to come up with a name that someone used for a weekend of abandoned code, that was thrown out onto the net. Given that the guy wrote a book on his language, I sincerely hope that he had the forethought to trademark the name.

rdtsc• 17 years ago

One does not need to trademark names in US.

harpastum• 17 years ago

Found an article on Go! from Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence[1].

Google's usage of the name will probably end up in more public interest in Go! simply because of this dispute.

[1]http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=998367

the_real_r2d2• 17 years ago

Yep, that normally happens. In my case I did not know about Go! until I read about Go.

gojomo2• 17 years ago

If only they'd picked a name that was easier to Google, they would have found this precursor.

If McCabe's selling a book based on his language, there's a reasonable case to be made he has a commercial trademark in "Go!" for a programming language.

Maybe Google can get McCabe's permission to call their language 'Go2'. Or perhaps "Went". As in, "the name 'Go' got up and 'Went'.".

Or 'Going'. Except they should say it rhymes with 'Boing', so that it's not the present participle of the trademarked 'go'. As in, "GOing Is Not Go!"

allenbrunson• 17 years ago

or they could call it 'gone'

i think this is an interesting submission, but the title is not very hacker news-ish. "Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(this is at least the fourth or fifth time i'm calling somebody on a title in as many weeks. i'm not crazy about being the news.yc scold. but every one of those titles did indeed get changed to something more neutral by the submitter or the editors, so i think i'm within community guidelines here.)

gojomo2• 17 years ago

I agree, and almost flagged it for the "OOHHHH SNAP". I wish there was a 'flag/review headline only' option.

tgittos• 17 years ago

I don't know if association with 'goto' is the best idea for a programming language.

I like 'Stop'. They could call their tutorial 'Stop Programming!'

moron4hire2• 17 years ago

it would definitely need a "hammer_time" command.

andrewljohnson3• 17 years ago

On the one hand, it's kind of hard to claim two letters.

On the other hand, Rob, Ken, et. al. really could have done a little Googling around before they chose to name their language after an existing language, no matter how obscure.

It strikes me as a little bit evil not to capitulate, particularly if the motivation not to do so is "this would really hurt our project so screw off little math guy" as opposed to "we think we are right and this name is fair game."

If the Google team thinks this is a non-issue, I'd like to hear some logic.

dangrover• 17 years ago

I dunno, I've heard of some pretty popular languages that only have one letter in the name.

andrewljohnson3• 17 years ago

You know, I take it back.

If C# is fair on top of C, then Go ought to be fair on top of Go!

Well-played :)

I guess I just wonder now why he added the bang at all.

wendroid• 17 years ago

One of the Unix room's Bell labs slogan was "think of a name no-one can market"

"Plan 9 From Bell Labs" being canonical

Gupie3• 17 years ago

Google should change the name from "Go" to "Goo". Problem solved...

Jeremysr• 17 years ago

not quite. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goo_(programming_language)

Manfred• 17 years ago

They can just keep adding O's until they have something unique (;

Gupie3• 17 years ago

Nice name for a language, I also like their home page http://people.csail.mit.edu/jrb/goo/

groaner• 17 years ago

It's not surprising that there would be namespace collisions given the thousands of programming languages there are out there and the limited number of "cool" names available. I suspect someone at Google could have merely consulted http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages and decided that "Go" was free.

That said, I still find it inexcusable that Adobe's over-the-top PR machine has stolen the name "flex" from a well-known open-source lexer generator... mumble mumble....

nearestneighbor• 17 years ago

They should call it GooGo

eam3• 17 years ago

Possibly even Gle pronounced "Go"?

chrischen• 17 years ago

Or Gle.

tzury2• 17 years ago

They should have google this name before choosing it.

This is a classic case of barefoot shoemaker.

cperciva• 17 years ago

They should have google this name before choosing it.

Try a google search for "go" and let us know if you find anything relevant.

kirubakaran• 17 years ago

Found in Page 2. It perhaps it was on Page 1 before Google released 'Go'.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=programming+languag...

Silhouette• 17 years ago

One of the papers on it is still at the top of the second page of Google search results for "go programming language" as I write this, despite the huge numbers of new pages about Google's on offering.

eam3• 17 years ago

This is certainly having a positive effect for Mccabe, free publicity. I had never heard of his Go! language... til now.

cturner• 17 years ago

I'd never heard of OS9 until they got stuck into Apple for releasing Mac OS 9 and commonly referring to it as "OS 9". And I haven't heard of OS9 since, either.

tzury2• 17 years ago

I think lango would be a great name and I am hereby to give away to google any copyrights for the name.

eam3• 17 years ago

And if there's ever a framework they can call it dlango.

tjogin2• 17 years ago

You think you have "copyright" of it because you just typed the word?

gdee• 17 years ago

that's how copyright works

mahmud3• 17 years ago

In the heavy weights league, there was no silly-slapping or hair pulling between Rob Pike and Luca Cardelli vs Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls over "Squeak":

http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Squeak.pdf [A New Jersey approach to the GUI, 1985]

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=263754&coll=portal... [Smalltalk dialect, 1997]

Their stated goals are identical, each more identical than the other.

mark_h• 17 years ago

I always wondered about that; there's an excellent tech-talk by Rob Pike on newsqueak here that I watched some time ago: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=810232012617965344

(It includes the same primes example that crops up in the Go tutorial)

growt• 17 years ago

Google isn't allowed to use the name 'gmail' in germany because someone owned the trademark 'g-mail ... und die post geht richtig ab' (or something similar). So the big guy doesnt always win and an exclamation mark doesnt make a difference. So if you feel like it, go for it. You might win. (I don't know if the word go is to common to count as a trademark, though).

dkersten• 17 years ago

But its not so common in the programming language domain.

archon810• 17 years ago

Who edited out the "OOHHH SNAP!" from my title? ಠ_ಠ

tsally• 17 years ago

Hi. I noticed you also posted this on Reddit. While the old title may actually have a positive effect on the story's popularity there, it has the reverse effect here. As you can see in the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), putting capitals in the title is frowned upon. Moderators routinely fix submissions in this way, so it's nothing personal.

rjurney2• 17 years ago

Plus, your edit resulted in two tweets from the newsbot - win!

basdog22• 17 years ago

Suggestions for Google's "go":

Went Gone Don't Go Goo Get there

dpcan• 17 years ago

Wouldn't it be great if Google just gave fmccabe a nice pay-day for his trouble of letting go of the name? (Or is this just a can of worms?)

mosburger• 17 years ago

Just commented on the comments page at the original link, but I'll post it here too.

I ran into a similar problem on an open source project I'm working on... we had a namespace collision on a twitter client, both with the name "Bluebird." Their team had a very talented designer, so I offered to change the name of my project in exchange for some artwork from them. I ended up changing the name of my project to "Buzzbird."

Surely there must be some way that Google could make a similar arrangement w/ fmccabe?

alrex021• 17 years ago

I see their irc channel is called

   #go-nuts

Maybe they should rename the language to

   go-nuts

and call their package manager

   get-nuts

;-)

dugmartin• 17 years ago

Too bad Amazon didn't release it - it could have been called "awe-nuts".

ErrantX• 17 years ago

Well namespace clashes are inevitable; In one sense I'd want to say "let the best language win"

But this is an outlier case because the "owners" are polar opposites in both the age of the language and who they are. Google would be polite to change names but I wouldn't be surprised if they dont.

Tichy3• 17 years ago

One is called Go, the other Go!. I don't see the problem (C, C++, C#...) - it is common for programing languages to just differ by one letter in their name.

martingordon• 17 years ago

Except that ! is silent, unlike ++ and #.

joubert• 17 years ago

Go-bang? (and in this case the question mark is silent)

twinwing• 17 years ago

Go Bang works

tsestrich• 17 years ago

You could read Go! as "go not" :)

rnicholson• 17 years ago

I think its time we stopped with that madness.

Tichy3• 17 years ago

Not that I disagree, just saying that the creator of Go! doesn't seem to have a very promising case on his hands.

raganwald• 17 years ago

Except that both C# and C++ are related to C. If Go! and Go are related languages, then the similarity in names is helpful. When the languages are dissimilar, the similarity of names is confusing.

This, I think, is ultimately the point of trademarks. It entirely about "property," it's also about clarity.

uriel• 17 years ago

> Except that both C# and C++ are related to C.

That is a very questionable claim.

l0nwlf• 17 years ago

Just the normal human tendency, weak people taking stand against big guy, to prove their existance. There is no point arguing, nor do i believe google did something evil. They just did a silly mistake and are being bashed more than their share, a bit unfair, not to mention an unknown guy with his unknown language is getting free publicity.

NikkiA2• 17 years ago

'Go' is a ridiculously short and context-less name for either project. He really doesn't have much of a soapbox to stand on and proclaim that his name is unique and unusual.

I suggest they both switch their names to something less short, I'm recommending 'Chess' or 'Checkers'.

kungfooey• 17 years ago

'Go' is 100% longer than C.

nuclear_eclipse• 17 years ago

It's also 33% quicker to type than C++

NikkiA2• 17 years ago

C is also, and was in 1970, a terrible name for a language.

In fairness to K&R though, they weren't able to predict that search engines would exist and single-letter names would be a pain in the ass. It was still a terrible name though.

DanielStraight• 17 years ago

Google definitely should've researched this more, and they should probably change the name, but don't forget that this isn't as simple as just typing a new name into a text box. There's a mailing list, a compiler, repository and website names, environment variables, internal references in the code, a keyword in the programming language (which wouldn't have to change, I suppose), supporting programs other than the compiler (pretty printer, documenter, etc.), and I'm sure plenty of stuff I'm forgetting. Something as simple as a name change probably means weeks or work and almost certainly lost momentum.

messel• 17 years ago

They could probably just write him a check?

larsberg• 17 years ago

No trademark filed => not their problem.

shpxnvz• 17 years ago

Strictly speaking, no registration is required for trademark protection in the U.S. - you simply need to have used the mark.

Registration is required to bring suit in Federal court, to prevent infringement from imported goods, to claim protection internationally, and to gain presumption of exclusive ownership nationwide.

You can also use the (TM) symbol to assert your claim on the mark without having registered it.

From the USPTO website:

Is registration of my mark required?

No. You can establish rights in a mark based on legitimate use of the mark.

johnohara• 17 years ago

Me thinks this whole discussion is going to last about as long as today's morning coffee in Disney's legal department.

"I have already used the name Go for *MY* programming language"

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"I have already used the name Go for MY programming language"