I'm going to be the dissenting voice here and say: Use whatever name you like as long as it isn't something like cuntbagDB.

CockroachDB accurately and immediately conveys meaning. It'll survive when nuclear war happens just like a cockroach. And I might work in the games industry but I would never have a hard time selling this. I would basically force them to use it and explain the benefits.

If your company wont adopt technology because it uses a bug as it's name then your company has much greater problems than technology adoption.

It's not my company or me, it's my clients. Here's a sort of long winded story explaining what I mean that the corporate world can't use anything with the name "cockroach". If you disagree after reading, I'm open for a friendly debate.

Average project, some 60 year old VP signing off on 100k of custom software with 8 pages of lawyer speak contracts is NOT going to allow "his" project to run off of "cockroach database". VP's/CEO's like to take personal ownership of projects they feel will go well, and ones done with us usually do. None of these people want ANY chance of their project getting criticized internally, so nobody will use CockroachDb. It's just not going to happen. Having successful projects is an easy way for these people to gather promotions and respect. Having any part of it do with "cockroach" could result in the whole project being an embarrassment.

Imagine the database goes down one day. One of their low level staff calls us(we have ongoing support contract). Problem gets rapidly escalated to development. One of our lead developers replies to the email thread, that by now has a third of the clients' company on it. "Yeah see the problem was the cockroach database that wasn't supposed to go down needed to be restarted" . Most of the staff think we're joking. Guarantee this becomes a big pun around their office, every time anything breaks in the app they say "maybe the cockroaches on the back end died again".

It's made worse by the fact that issues in software systems are commonly called "bugs". Well, our system doesn't have general bugs anymore, it has "cockroaches". Do you think this is an unlikely scenario? Because it's not. Besides the word "cockroach" this is exactly how urgent issues tend to be reported and fixed. Replace "cockroach" with "Microsoft" and I've probably violated my NDA. After that incident, whoever championed the project, probably our strongest ally in the company, resents us for making such a stupid mistake that resulted in his project becoming a joke. Maybe we aren't as great of a dev shop as he once thought? Maybe it's better to do open bidding next time so whoever wins he can't be blamed directly for what happens.

You could say their company culture sucks, maybe it does? But that doesn't change that I can't use it on any client projects because of the chance we'll lose hundreds of thousands over a stupid name.

There's plenty of other names that convey meaning but don't make lawyers nervous. Your attitude of "oh, well if you can't use it your company culture sucks" is EXACTLY why nobody will rename it and why corporate american won't touch it. Nobody cares about how cool it is to be edgy when millions of dollars are on the line.

If you plan on forcing clients to use it you might as well hold a going away party for any of your clients with more than 5M revenue.

If your VP isn't trusting his technical directors to make appropriate choices when producing quality reliable software and infrastructure then I would say that is a problem with company culture.

I wouldn't have a problem selling the technical merits of a highly consistent database to a technical director. So everything else is moot to me.

I agree about the "bug" association, that is a negative stigma that I could see attached to it- but there are plenty of projects who have stupid names which pass by unnoticed.

take distro release names; Beefy Miracle.. Wheezy.. Natty Narwahl.

And these terms are used internally too. "Oh, that machine was running Squeeze and not Jessie which is why we can't install the latest gdb" etc;

You're giving this much more credence than it will have in real life.

Fair enough, we can disagree cordially on this one. I agree that it shouldn't matter but we disagree that it does.

The other names you mentioned have a more silly connotation then bad or gross but I understand your point.

I will still serve as an example of somebody that will avoid cockroach db due to name alone so there's at least one of us out there

Perhaps we can fork it, rename it and offer very expensive business class support so your VP can feel good about using "IronTardigradeDB" :)

I had the same issue with another tool I used called "agent ransack". The solution is simple, offer the same product with a different name to corporate clients. They have a different download called "file locator pro" that's literally exactly the same, without the bad name.

Guess which one we use in the office?

Dura means fool (feminine gender) in Russian :)

RoachDB !