Liquidata Inc. is now DoltHub Inc.
Today, we are changing our company name to DoltHub Inc. It's the end of the Liquidata era. We will be changing our emails and all our company branding to reflect the name change.
Liquidata Origin Story
We started Liquidata a little over two years ago with the mission to "add liquidity to the data market". We wanted a place on the internet to get access to interesting, maintained data.
Shortly after getting started, we attempted to acquire either the "liquiddata" or "liquidata" .com domain but our attempts were thwarted. We went with the .co domain and had a tinge of regret since.
We started out with a data marketplace concept that was similar to RapidAPI or MashApe (acquired by RapidAPI). We always believed the main inhibitor to data collaboration was branch and merge, like we have with source code, but we initially wanted to bring that concept to APIs. We still think this is a good idea and may eventually get to it.
As we worked on this mission, we realized a relational database with Git-style versioning was a critical piece of missing data-sharing infrastructure. APIs were useful but for most modern data applications, getting access to all the data was preferable to accessing the data piecemeal as you do with APIs. Thus, a new database was born.
Dolt Origin Story
We built a database with Git-Style versioning. When naming the product, we wanted to pay homage to Git, our inspiration. We would have a command line interface that was the exact clone of Git's and we wanted users to think of Git implicitly when using the product.
The name Git has a few origin stories but the one we like the most is that Linus named it after himself. Git means something akin to "idiot" in British slang. Thus, we needed a word that meant "idiot", that was short enough to type on the command line, that started with "d" for data. We came up with Dolt and despite our inhibitions about naming a product "a stupid person", the name stuck. We have grown quite fond of it.
Luckily, dolthub.com was also available, so we snapped that up as well as doltdb.com. We then built DoltHub as a place on the internet to share Dolt databases.
We prefer DoltHub
As we've put more time and money behind DoltHub, the Liquidata name became obsolete. Though we're nostalgic about the original Liquidata name, it's time to throw our full weight behind Dolt and DoltHub as our flagship products. More people know us by our product names, Dolt and DoltHub, than Liquidata.
Where to find us now
Some of our social accounts moved. Our email is forwarded for our @liquidata.co addresses. We now have @dolthub.com addresses.
GitHub
We have renamed our GitHub organization, previously liquidata-inc to dolthub. Links to existing repositories and checkouts with remote URLs referencing liquidata-inc will continue to work. Our existing open source projects written in go, in particular our vitess fork, go-mysql-server and dolt repositories, will soon get new golang module names in the dolthub path instead of the liquidata-inc path. Previous references to these projects will continue to work with the liquidata-inc path, but at some point when a user upgrades their dependency, they will also need to update their imports and go.mod reference.
DoltHub
We were publishing databases on DoltHub under the "Liquidata" organization. We have migrated those all to the "dolthub" organization. Existing clones and remotes will continue to work.
We already owned @DoltHub. We moved that to @DoltHubOG and our main @Liquidata1 account became @DoltHub. We'll be tweeting from @DoltHub from now on.
Renaming the company to DoltHub was pretty straight forward and we retained the same link.
YouTube
We had some old videos of using Dolt in the shell published on our Liquidata channel. Migrating the channel name was difficult so we instead deleted the channel. We'll make a DoltHub channel and publish some new videos soon.
Conclusion
With a name like DoltHub you almost have to win. If you lose you really are the hub of stupid people. We accept the challenge. DoltHub for the win.