How Roots Got the @roots Name on GitHub

Occasionally I still think about this old interaction and finally wanted to write about it.

I released Roots in 2011 as a WordPress starter theme. The starter theme eventually got renamed to Sage, and “Roots” became the name for the full ecosystem:

• 2011 — Sage (originally “Roots”), a WordPress starter theme
• 2013 — Bedrock, a WordPress boilerplate with modern dependency management
• 2014 — Trellis, server provisioning and deployment for WordPress
• 2017 — Acorn, a Laravel integration for WordPress plugins and themes

In 2013 we were still just a starter theme and didn’t have a GitHub organization, but we already had bigger plans in place. The @roots username appeared to be unused — it belonged to a guy named Rick. There was another open source project called “roots” too, a static site generator. Their team also wanted the username, and they opened an issue to coordinate getting it.

Their approach was to contact GitHub support to invoke the name squatting policy. I had actually already done this just days before them. GitHub told me the account wasn’t inactive, but they offered to pass along a message to the owner on my behalf. Here’s what I sent on June 24th, 2013:

Hey there, I run a project called Roots (github.com/retlehs/roots) and wanted to create a GitHub org to use as an umbrella for related projects. I was wondering if you’d be willing to rename your account so that we could use ‘roots’ as the organization name. If not, no worries, I understand :)

Meanwhile, the other team was pinging the account owner repeatedly and one collaborator suggested they “just harass them on twitter”. They were also shitting on our project:

And yeah, this repo is smaller in terms of stars, but the scope of the project is much larger and encompasses several repos, which is why we want a team to put them all in.

Yeah, I’ve used the roots WordPress starter theme, and I do freelance developing for WordPress themes. Thus, I know exactly what the scope of your project is.

I commented that they had no idea about the scope of our project, and that being dicks about it probably doesn’t help anything.

Rick responded:

Finally, Ben, thanks. If you guys simply asked me instead of contacting Github first, spamming me and “being dicks about it”, I would have been more than happy to help.

I’ll contact Github support and get this sorted. Good luck on the project, perhaps i’ll use it some day :).

Today the @roots organization has 40+ active public repos, 30+ packages on Packagist with over 84 million downloads, and more than 28k GitHub stars. Sage is also currently the 45th most starred PHP repository on GitHub.

Thank you again, Rick!