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