My research-based company’s name is already taken on github (mailed the owner without any luck), what is the most recognized naming conventions for company github accounts besides the name directly?
the only ones I found was ibm-dojo and ibm-research
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Usually, each company has their own naming convention (if any) for projects like that. For example, IBM has policies in place regarding social media interaction as well as open-source project contributions.
Generally, it’s poor form to take the main company name within a repository like GitHub. In larger organizations, it would be a CLM (career limiting move) for a non-senior employee to take the main name and not be easily accessible. At IBM, anyone less than a VP claiming the parent name would likely have a short conversation with Legal wherein the relinquish the account credentials.
Assuming the parent company wants its name on the project, then parentCo-subproject is a pretty common naming approach. Even if the company isn’t large enough to sponsor all that many projects, it doesn’t hurt to use that pattern anyway. Projects will come and go, and that makes life easier on future projects (as you’re now finding).
Unfortunately, that’s not a universal rule and not everyone thinks things through before registering their company on an OSS site.
The above answer pertains mostly to larger companies where the risk of company name collision with other companies is low, but there’s a decent risk of project name collision.
Smaller firms may find there is another organization with their name, and it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to find some sort of arbitration regarding the name’s usage (or they might lose in that arbitration). There are a number of different collision reasons, but all of them generally end up in the 2nd party losing out on the primary name.
At that point, what I have seen is the organization adding some degree of localization to distinguish themselves. That could be a simple -US or -CA to indicate country, or a .net to show they are foo.net and not foo.com, or they could use the full URL of their main site.
That said, I still think that companyName-project forms a good pattern for the OSS registry. It creates a subtle shift in the branding of the account as the company is now relying more upon the project brand in order to distinguish that OSS project.
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