Change the name of gocd

[hammerdr]

Go is a really hard language to find and identify. We should change the name to something memorable, short and googlable.

[xiaods]

I don't think this is feasible proposal, it happened and waste heavily cost on branding. i suggest focus on Usability,Feature, architecture

[erikbgithub]

Of course it's your decision to choose a name of your liking. There are many reasons for a name change, though:

• you probably posted your news on HN to get feedback, and this is basically it!
• I never used Go lang and still think of it when I read "Go" in a technical context (I guess many others feel alike)
• even before both names the word "Go" was associated with the game of 围棋 (Go is the Japanese word for it) which is known world wide with nerds like us. Even the German word for it is "Go".
• also "Go" itself is quite a common word in the English language and isn't necessarily always associated with "Let's go" or "easy going" which might be what you want people to associate with your tool
• it is not necessarily associated with a CD tool, therefore another name might be more suitable anyway
• you guys yourself chose to call your team and your repository "gocd" not "go", which probably also had a reason
• in B2B context branding is about your company and team, not about the nickname of your product. ThoughtWorks is a brand people have heard about.
• even a small change like "Go CD" or "ThoughtWorks Go" might already do it.

You know, your experience right now is the same as my first experience with delivering FOSS. People always talk about stuff that you certainly didn't want to change, and they refuse to talk about things that might actually be important. :-)

[kmugrage]

TL;DR - Most of the current committers would like to change the name too, just not sure how high priority it is, and it's a LOT of work.

@erikb85 Many of us who were involved in some way with Go before it was converted to open source are in complete agreement around the issues with the name. Heck, the two GH issues filed on this were both filed by TW'ers, one of whom is a committer on the project. Most of the questions (again, not all) about the name now coming from outside of ThoughtWorks aren't actually users of the product, just reacting to the first time they are seeing the name. I think this is why many people seem to think it's a new product with a recently chosen name.

What we really need to decide from the community of people actually using Go is this; where does this rank against all of the other things you would like the product to do? It really is a tremendous amount of work. Heck, there's still quite a bit of tech debt around from the name change 4 years ago. It's there because the users of the product told us loud and clear that they where more interested in new features.

There's a high level list of the kind of things the current team thinks should be next at http://www.go.cd/contribute/roadmap.html.

Of of that said, this truly is an open source project now. If the community of users feels strong enough about this that they believe it should be higher on the priority list and they are willing to contribute to making it happen, that's how things like this get done.

[srinivasupadhya]

I created #131 and Im a committer on Go. I know its excruciating amount of work to rename a product both on the dev side & the branding side having done one rename ourselves! I created it to gauge the interest in the community. I also wanted to explain why its a lot of work, which @kmugrage's reply is doing. I tried finding an existing issue for it din't find any so created one. Sorry for the confusion.

[aconrad]

I'd like to +1 this issue.

Searching for Go-related topics is terrible. I always look for "gocd" (in quotes otherwise Google ignores it probably because there are too few results) but then not everyone uses this terminology (which may explain the too few results). When I talk about this product, I always refer to it as go-cd as well (gow-see-dee).

What about re-branding it to "GoCD" would be sufficient so people can officially start referring to this tool in almost the same way as they were used to and having more letters as part of the official name would make it a better discriminator. Obviously, the documentation would have to be updated, as well as the logo, other text/UI elements of the app, etc. That being said, the internal variables names that are go-branded could stay unchanged (e.g., environment variables could be kept prefixed as GO_) in order for existing pipelines to still work (and it wouldn't be weird, whereas Jenkins still has var names referring to Hudson).

This effort would make the branding change less disruptive. Also, because "Go" and "GoCD" are almost the same, the effort to change the name may be iterative meaning that not everything has to change at once -- if there are places where I see "Go" and others where I see "GoCD", meh, it's likely that I'll understand what you mean. Of course, documentation wise, it's better to be consistent but I'm less worried about this part, a find/replace will likely do most of the job. Packages available for download are branded as go-server and go-agent, that would be nice to have gocd-server and gocd-agent and nothing prevents from making both available if scripts in the wild rely on these. PR wise, a blog post would be sufficient. Best of all: you can keep the same domain name and git repository!

I think this could be a good intermediate approach. If this approach still isn't enough then maybe more thoughts and efforts can be put into finding a brand new name.

[webmaster128]

I'm not (yet) a committer but a happy user and yesterday I created #843

The core of my point: this is not a matter of taste ("Go" is quite cool), the current name is a real productivity killer.

[jyotisingh]

While all the reasons for renaming and not renaming Go still stand, if you are really blocked and do not know how to look up for more information about Go, try the following:
(i) Append "thoughtworks go" or "gocd" to your search string
(ii) Just ask on go-cd or go-cd-dev mailing lists

[fff]

#843 is quite persuasive , and I'm feeling the exactly same pain when I tried to google some puzzle with "go". As go-cd is open-sourced and been expected to be widely used, googlable is quite a matter for new users, mail-list is no longer a fashion, and Google or stackoverflow is, searching is. So keep using a a name which is consistent and easy to distinguish, is quite important.
One option maybe just use go-cd officially, which is much better than "Go".

[arvindsv]

Slowly, it's organically changing to "GoCD". Closing this.