Google's response to this makes me want to create a pornography search engine called "Go Ogle!" and respond to the inevitable cease-and-desist letters with "the naming similarity is unfortunate, but I don't expect it will cause more than minimal confusion".
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
> 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!
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 would've been interesting if they had renamed the language, "Issue 9".
I think Google missed an opportunity to gain a little developer goodwill here, but I don't think it will hurt them in the long run. (Assuming Go ever becomes a popular language)
Rob Pike and Ken Thompson were not only on the development team for Plan 9, many of the ideas in Go come directly from their work on the Limbo language.
I do feel for the guy, but if I'm being honest and practical, it will be less trouble for him to change the name of his obscure and almost unused language than it would be for Google to rename Go.
It would have been nice if Google had avoided the name conflict, but unfortunately there's no central programming language registry and he had done nothing to make his language easily discovered (to the point where it didn't even have a website), so it seems likely that Google chose the same name in complete innocence — at the worst, it seems like they might have thought it was a toy name for a toy language used simply for explanatory purposes, not something anyone cared about.
Essentially, once the name was already associated in people's minds with Google, the horses were out of the barn. He chose to get concerned about Go!'s presence in the public consciousness far too late.
> How much hassle would it have been for Google to have changed the name before they announced it?
Or right after they did, considering the state of the language at the time I doubt it was used that much internally, so it's not like it would have cost them billions of man-hours in lost productivity.
Except that it appears the language was so obscure that Googling it did not pull back any references. Not entirely surprising given that there wasn't even a website for the language at the time.
What some people are missing is that before Google's Go, the Go! language was so obscure that even googling for "go" would not have found it. In fact, the second comment (http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=9&cnum=500&...) on the issue, by the Go! designer himself, suggests that to find its page you should google for his name, not for "go" or "go programming language".
Before people get carried away with stories about how the big guy is crushing the little guy, keep in mind that there are at least 4 different programming languages named D, and this doesn't seem to have killed any of those projects. Name collisions are inevitable when everyone picks names that are around 1-4 characters.
When I saw that I didn't see it as cold, but as cool. You can't expect to block anyone from using a name they like just because you would like to use it for your hobby project. While I understand the Go! language designer having a go at it, the issue was soon reduced to whiners whining about a complete non-issue. Had Google tried to block the Go! designer from continuing to use his name, they would have been evil, but as things are, they are not evil at all.
Unsure on this. Submission vs Reception debate? Submitting papers and publishing books is attempting to initiate the move from hobby to research topic or accepted language but it doesn't look like it moved much past that. Virtually anyone can take these actions if they are motivated enough.
Tracking the history on this is a bit slippery because "go" is such a genric term. To qualify this it is a case of finding out what peer review or engagement was undertaken and how far the idea of Go! (as in the non-google one) made it, or if further languages or research were progressed on the back of it.
> Submitting papers and publishing books is attempting to initiate the move from hobby to research topic or accepted language but it doesn't look like it moved much past that.
As someone who dabbed into multi-agent programming back in early 2000s, I can assure you there are lots of obscure languages and projects in the area. Just like in any other CS field.
Adoption is irrelevant, it is still nice to refer to someone's work by name as a part of scientific discourse.
Definitely! I published bits here and there as an undergrad on some more obscure analytical chemistry stuff, and it was a brilliant feeling to contribute. Just in this context, it doesn't appear that it would have been notable enough for google to pick up on before they ran with the name.
I don't think I'm arguing much pro or con wise on the topic itself, just siding off into the topic of publication vs wider adoption in the target community. My case was the same, I'm sure my work was interesting and important, but it didn't exactly set the journals on fire. =)
If you've ever managed an open-source project and have to deal with tens or hundreds of requests for features or changes to the API specific to a single use-case (usually that the requestor needs for a client but doesn't want to implement themselves) you'd understand why sometimes "WONTFIX" is the only suitable reply.
I wish Google would have come up with a new name, and I feel bad for this guy, but it's just way too common a name to figure you'll have it all to yourself. I'd feel the same way if the language was called "Do" or "Run".
Did anyone really think Google was going to respond in any other way? I read Issue 9 when it came out along with some of the comments on it. I knew then Google would just close the ticket and do nothing.
On the one-hand I feel for the developer who originally named his language "Go." On the other hand I've never heard of it... Who does HN think is right in this case and why?
Google has the mightiest search engine ever created and they couldn't check there wasn't already a programming language by that name? It would just have been polite.
Or: Google has the mightiest search engine ever created and they didn't find his language when they checked? It must have been so obscure that you can't really blame them.
I'm torn. You can't copyright names and such, those are trademarks. And while he has tried to defend his mark publicly, and could possibly register it retroactively (in the US, don't know about overseas), his defense hasn't been very energetic. The book he mentions is a self-published one and the sad fact is that the language has gotten little traction since first announcement in 2003.
So on the one hand, I feel that one can't possibly satisfy everyone, and if you're going to snag a desirable name like 'Go' for your product, it's up to you to think ahead about how to preserve your rights of ownership. For example 'Go' could be a great name for a brand of shoes or a bicycle, but if you don't launch an actual product people can buy and associate the name with it, then you can't complain too much when Nike or someone tries the same thing later. Go author Frank McCabe's own homepage [1] doesn't exactly ddraw attention to the project. On the other hand, Google has IMHO been a bit heavy-handed in defending their own mark, as when they picked a fight with 'Groggle' an Australian startup which aimed to help users find retailers of particular alcoholic drinks (grog being a synonym for booze down under), though both the site and dispute seem to be on the back burner right now.
A nicer and inexpensive solution (in case anyone@google is reading) would be a link on the Go! homepage saying 'If you're looking for the Go logic programming language by McCabe and Clark, click here.' To be honest, I think the unfortunate naming overlap has generated more attention for the Go language than it would ever have acquired on its own.
Larry Wall used grep over a Usenet feed to be sure that he would catch all references to Perl. (He did this before Kibo popularized the technique.) He therefore wanted a name that (among other things) would have very few false positives.
True, but C's past the critical mass where googling for just "C" is likely to get you info about the programming language. 3 of the top 10 results (including #2) are about C programming. Most of the rest are about Citigroup, which has the stock symbol 'C'. (Oddly, Cookie Monster is missing.)
I see this as a sort of a trademark issue, even though both probably dont have a Go trademark. The guy may have been the first to "take" the name, but what he did not do is to be successful enough with it to earn a de facto trademark. Basically nobody knows his Go, so there is no trademark. And without a trademark, legal or de facto, you cant claim exclusive rights to a name.
A trademark (again, legal or de facto) violation would have occured here if google knowingly took the name Go to gain an advantage from the (non-existing) good reputation this guy built around his Go. But they didnt, since their Go, by the virtue of Googles impact alone, probably got more brand awareness in the first hour of the first presentation, than this guy's Go in 10 years.
Does this mean that the "big guys" can simply take over names from the small guys? Yes and no. Yes, because if you want to protect a name, protect it legally, as everybody else does. Theres a legal mechanism for that. And No, because the guy still can keep his name, Google didnt trademark it and then sued him. The world is large enough for 2 (and more) Go's. Just being the first to take a name for some obscure personal mini-project nobody else cares about _should_ not mean that now nobody can use the same name, worldwide, ever again.
Seems like an instance of the well-known "Michael Bolton Problem" from Office Space. You had a name, you were using it, but something significantly more notable comes along with the same name. They didn't steal your name, but by virtue of being much more popular, now nobody thinks of you when they hear your name, they think of the other thing that you have no association with and came after you.
There's no theft, just an annoyance for you. You were probably never going to be famous, but now it is much harder. On the ironic upside, people who didn't care about you before now remember you, because of the naming conflict.
As far as I know, that language has always been called Go! (your referenced wikipedia page doesn't state otherwise, although the wikipedia page for Go! didn't even exist before Google annouced its Go language).
Maybe no one you know. Try looking for a job doing C, and wading through the confused recruiters. I die a little every time I see "C/C++/C#" in a posting. (To say nothing of the ones calling "Ruby on Rails" a language.)
