I’ve been a loyal customer of GitHub since 2010
A couple of years ago, I started Cohoda – a software consulting company.
Shortly after forming the company, I tried to register the github username – ‘cohoda’
It was taken (which I thought odd, since ‘Cohoda’ was a made up word!)
After some investigation, I could see that there was literally nothing on the profile.
- No name
- No photo
- No activity
No google results for “github.com/cohoda”
Nothing.
I contacted GitHub support, thinking that perhaps I had registered the name previously, but had forgot.
They refuse point blank to help, saying the “username is not available for release under our name-squatting policy”
Their suggestion is to create a new username appended with ‘ltd’ or ‘2’ or something like that.
I wonder what would have happened, should I have registered ‘twitter’ or ‘dropbox’ or ‘google’ in GitHub’s infancy?
Would they have stuck to their ‘name squatting’ policy? I think not.
2015 Update
After contacting them again, and pointing out this is clearly a dormant account, they relinquished the name, and Cohoda LTD are now the proud owners of the Cohoda GitHub username. Finally!