I'm under the impression that this name based aversion is only existing among English native speaking people. Here on the other side of the fence, even if some do know what a cockroach is, I see no gut reactions (but I'm only a single data point).
I can say for sure it's not just for English speaking people.
Rather, I'm actually curious why you think some cultures may even think that cockroaches are OK.
Cockroaches are universally considered as pests all over the world because they ARE pests, that's how they survive. Look up wikipedia to learn more about cockroaches. They have an entire section describing the relationship between humans and cockroaches, mostly about them being a pest.
I read bpizzi's post as saying that, for non-native English speakers, the name doesn't trigger the same aversion because the mental connection between the English name and memories of the bugs is weaker, since we grew up calling them something else. At least that's the case for me, as a non-native English speaker myself.
I thought the same thing. I like it, but my company's IT director will never allow it. Maybe they want to target the startups and couldn't care less about the old school companies...no idea.
This seems to imply CockroachDB's name would be ignoring/bad marketing? I think it's fine. I see a lot of people saying something along the lines of "if it had a different name I would have looked at it earlier" but honestly I think if it was really named differently with a less remarkable name they would not have noticed it in the first place.
You can see lots of people in this thread alone saying they have an instinctive, visceral negative reaction to the name. If you think that's good marketing, I don't really know what to say...
More so, no large company with Oracle & Postgres & mission critical applications serving the nation will go, let's switch to this cockroach thing...it would have to reach critical mass first