Rename the github organizations

[sethfork]

Rename the github orgs

If the schism in the Ethereum community wasn’t already confusing enough for outsiders, it’s obscured even further by the names of our two github organizations - and to our own detriment.

Consider this scenario:
If an outside party had just heard of the Ethereum Classic Project and wanted to examine our development efforts, they would instinctively search 'ethereum classic' or 'ethereumclassic' on github. Should they follow that most natural search path, they'd soon find an organization with exclusively marketing-focussed repos. Seeing no evidence of actual development; they would then naturally conclude that our project is a sham, which is as certifiably false as it is insulting to the outstanding work you've all done thus far.

The effects of these conclusions stand in direct opposition to the best interest of our community. We’ll miss out on opportunities for bringing in contributors, community members, and third parties that could potentially be valuable additions to our ecosystem.

If unrealized potential value-add isn’t enough cause for concern; I’d like to also point out that this misrepresentation is neither new nor self-contained. Given the (rebellious) nature of our project, we have enemies with both the ideological and financial motivations for invalidating our cause and efforts. The most common attack by non-subscribers is that we have “no devs” and that we haven’t accomplished much beyond the creation of a logo and some nice words about immutability. With the spotlight on us right now, we can’t afford to lend any fuel to this absurd attack.

In the interest of fortifying our outward-facing brand; making it easier for devs and interested parties to join our ecosystem; and more accurately representing the talent and persistence of our contributors; I propose we rename our github organizations.

The proposal:

1. Rename the ethereumclassic github organization to something more indicative of it’s purpose as a hub for marketing resources OR transfer all it’s repos to the ethereumproject organization.

2. Change the name of the ethereumproject organization to ‘ethereumclassic’

To prepare for the change, developers should:

• Point to the new remote origin on any local code checkouts.
• Validate any 3rd party webservice integrations. (Repo owners)
• Validate any OAuth apps (Project owners)

To help developers prepare for the change we suggest an announcement be made one week prior to the change on all channels, e.g., Github, Slack, IRC, Telegram, Reddit, etc. This should ensure each contributor has enough time to make any necessary changes and development efforts are left unhindered.

[whatisgravity]

This is the Ethereum Classic project, so ethere project, makes sense. Especially considering as the logic of the situation is that this is actually Ethereum just as much as ETF is Ethereum.

The move would require a lot of time, several projects have a lot of lines of the code with this organization name, and its not just a simple find and replace job to switch it out.

Doing this provides little benefit, time spent on this would be better spent petitioning Ethereum Foundation to stop falsely advertising as offering "Unstoppable applications, censorship resistant, and without third party interference" because that does more to confuse the two currencies than anything else.

When I have time to invest in this project, I will be investing it on pushing the projects forward, fixing security issues and pulling upstream patches. This is a giant red herring and the time of volunteers is best spent elsewhere.

We still do not have the man power to to maintain all the clients I would like to be maintained, let alone start the new ones I'm researching and planning on launching as replacements. it would be absurd to spend developer time on a trivial task.

The most common attack by non-subscribers is that we have “no devs” and that we haven’t accomplished much beyond the creation of a logo and some nice words about immutability.

Stop listening to trolls then? You will find if you don't dialogue with speculators who troll, you will have much more time to do more productive things.

Trying to prove trolls wrong is a waste of time, they will find something just as illogical to troll about.

You would also be playing right into their strategy, constant moving of repositories is exactly what Ethereum Fork trolls would prefer us to do, its a giant waste of time and resources and is treading water.

And on that note, we benefit the most out of our repository name being similar, and if we last long enough we will want to eventually move back over to the Ethereum name space. There is no reason to break ties with the name, its not beneficial to us.

[ericsomdahl]

I agree that there are no technical benefits to renaming the ethereumproject org. The benefit is purely on the business side. ethereumproject is the Twitter handle of the EF. Using that on github makes us look like we are at the level of domain squatters.

As to the effort required: A search of the ethereumproject org shows that for most (just about all except for go-ethereum) of the repos it WILL be a simple find/replace/build operation. Only geth, cpp-ethereum, and classicetherwallet have external CI integrations that I didn't personally set up.

[marcusrbrown]

Give me the permissions needed to do the rename in both organizations and I'll take care of the move and the rename. The move and rename would take an hour at most. The combined cost of developers having to update their remotes on the projects they have checked out is negligible.

@whatisgravity It's up to the volunteers to decide how to manage their time, not you, although your opinion of where time should be spent is noted. I have not heard it discussed often that we will move into the Ethereum namespace. On the contrary, the majority of core developers agree that Ethereum Classic will continue to move away from Ethereum at the protocol level. It's already a separate coin at the idealogical level for whatever that's worth. We are now also distinguished as a separate coin in the BIP44 specification for HD wallets. It would be delusional to think that one day Classic will become Ethereum, that ship has sailed. They have their coin, we have ours.

The goal of this project should be to surpass Ethereum's capabilities and provide more value on top of what's provided with the guarantee of immutability. In any case, we gain so much more by cooperating with and coordinating with Ethereum developers, instead of creating unnecessary enmity between the two groups. They have many more developers and working with them on improvements that benefit either or both chains is a huge boon to us.

@ericsomdahl I can take care of the cpp-ethereum AppVeyor and Travis integrations. With a week's lead time, that should be enough to notify the geth and classicetherwallet maintainers to prepare to update theirs.

[arvicco]

Please don't forget that our site http://ethereumclassic.github.io/ is a Github Page. Renaming the org means the site needs to be transferred there as well, and the people from current ethereumclassic org who maintain it given appropriate rights.

[marcusrbrown]

I've taken the step of reassigning permissions into consideration. I didn't think about any GitHub pages, thanks. I move my estimate to two hours to cover anything else like that.

[ericsomdahl]

@igetgames l was going to make you an owner of the org, giving you renaming perms, but my ownership privs were removed a few minutes ago. I will do some testing to see whether that broke our Bintray integration (enabling that integration is why I had owner privs to begin with).

I am assuming that @whatisgravity is now the GodKing of this organization and that all decisions must clear him. All hail WhatIsVitalik.

[splix]

I agree that it would be better to have ethereumclassic project name (or etc, or anything like that). It makes a lot of confusion to the people that are coming to ETC, they can't understand which project it legit.

On other hand I see that it's not so easy to make this migration. It will take time, not only for updating all internal links and configurations, but also to update all external links, from external websites, social networks, etc. Links to projects, to releases, to issues (and remember that after renaming we'll lose our existing channel of new volunteers). All of this can be fixed, though, but it's time consuming. Unfortunately not all of us have plenty of free time do that. I have limited time to spend on ETC, and I'd better spend it something important, rather than on a least important things like this one, and I don't want anyone to force me spend my time on this.

To anyone who have a lot of free time and who doesn't know how he can help the project, I suggest to take a look at The Bomb project: https://github.com/ethereumproject/volunteer/tree/master/Difficulty-Bomb-Defusal
This is the most important thing right now, I don't think it make any sense to spend time on non-important things before The Bomb will be defused.

[splix]

@ericsomdahl Sorry, it's me who reverted your status to a standard member. Nothing personal, I just trying to stop us from making important decisions too fast.

[ericsomdahl]

@whatisgravity I apologize for those remarks.

@splix One week of lead time is insufficient? How much time is appropriate then? a month? a year? Noone was talking about making these changes today.

[marcusrbrown]

@splix We had a lot of developers pushing for it on Slack, so we moved the discussion here to facilitate more discussion. We aren't planning to do anything until a week after we make an announcement of our intent.

[splix]

I agree that we should discuss it, I'm just against making these changes today (maybe I misunderstood you, but it looks like there was a plan to do it "today", even this concrete word was used. UPD sorry, just checked, word "today" wasn't used, but it was written like this).

I was thinking about this naming too, but considered it as not so important for now. I personally think if we'll start focusing on an unimportant things, we can lose our momentum and our chance to make ETC a big thing.

I saw earlier discussion on Slack, but it was in slightly different context. And as I understand we still can't come to decision about the future name of the project. So let's respect each other's work and opinion, and see how we can proceed with this in following weeks or months.

Let's postpone this Renaming till we will have full picture of all related works, and for this moment let's focus on development.

[ChuckSRQ]

There was plan to make an "announcement" today to make the change a week from now to allow developers the time to prepare for the change.

But it was sort of a pre announcement announcement just to make sure it was okay. Which it obviously was not. And we prepared for that by encouraging people to make an objection if necessary. So I apologize if I jumped the gun. But I was just tired or seeing conversations where everyone involved seems to be in agreement and nothing happens.

I definitely don't want to see development efforts hurt by a name change. I know it's not a high priority. But I do think it should be a goal and it seems to me the longer we postpone such a change, the harder and more difficult it will be.

We'll always have something to do which is a higher priority. But I think there are good reasons for the change.

1. It's confusing for developers and users alike. If a new developer wants to contribute, it might take him some time to find the developer's repo.

2. It will help to establish the separation that exists between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. I don't think the possibility exists that ETC will ever occupy the Ethereum namespace.

3. It's more professional. We have our own name and brand. We should try to be as consistent as possible. I'm not saying we should centralize marketing decisions or anything like that, but it does help us to be consistent as possible.

4. Legal issues. I think it would be foolish for the EF to try to sue us for Trademark infringement. But they do have a lot of pressure from their users to do this and if there is anything we can do to give them less ammunition for their legal arguments, then those options should be pursued IMO. Anything we can do to make their case weaker and more likely to fail benefits us.

I know a change could be disruptive to development work and It's why I didn't push the issue further in our first few weeks as a community. And it's also why I stressed that we should have some time to communicate to all developers of the change a week before doing so.

[sethfork]

It's hard to see why this would be a contentious issue.

Despite @whatisgravity's assurances of this being an unjustifiably laborious pursuit for the 'no benefit' it provides; members of the marketing, administrative, and community development teams on slack are, for the most part, in complete agreement that this would be an obvious move- so long as it doesn't hinder development.

If we can accept the switch as worthwhile, it's then just a matter of deciding on implementation and a reasonable timetable for that implementation.

[pyskell]

I'm pro renaming for the following reasons:

• Reduces confusion between the two projects
• Improves our brand identity
• Would help search engine results. Right now the top github.com result for "Ethereum Classic" is the "ethereumclassic" repo, not this one.

Perhaps we can two stage this though, come to consensus on whether or not to change the name, then establish the timeline if we agree on a change.

[marcusrbrown]

From the prior discussion on Slack and this thread, it appears we are at majority consensus. Let's let it percolate for a couple of days to allow more people to weigh in. Now we need to establish a timeline. This is one of those situations where it is easier to rip the band-aid off now than to wait until we have more developers and projects to fix.

FTR, no one is talking about changing the name of Ethereum Classic, the discussion is about renaming the poorly-named "ethereumproject" GitHub organization (to exactly ethereumclassic), after consolidating the separate but not really equal "ethereumclassic" GitHub organization. The collateral damage is that anyone with a local Git repo pointing to either organization needs to update their remote origin, and any third-party services will have to be reseated.

As far as the rest, we should be more open to encouraging volunteers work on whatever they want that benefits the project. This project will continue to attract developers and members of varying disciplines, I don't see why we need to funnel everyone.