# Announcing Octez **URL:** \ **Category:** Research and Development\ **Created:** [June 21, 2021, 1:41pm UTC](https://forum.tezosagora.org/t/announcing-octez/3368 "2021-06-21T13:41:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![NomadicLabs](https://forum.tezosagora.org/user_avatar/forum.tezosagora.org/nomadiclabs/32/763_2.png) [@NomadicLabs](https://forum.tezosagora.org/u/NomadicLabs)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2021, 1:41pm UTC](https://forum.tezosagora.org/t/announcing-octez/3368/1 "2021-06-21T13:41:41Z")
A veteran implementation of Tezos gets a name: Octez ## Rome the city, Rome the ideal There’s a [powerful scene in the film the Gladiator](https://youtu.be/h8MtObh-wDo?t=136) where the Emperor Marcus Aurelius explains that Rome is both a physical installation of bricks and mortar, and also it is the _idea_ of Rome — an ecosystem of standards and laws by which the people lived and a city was built. In other words: Rome is a city, and an ideal. When you download Tezos, you are actually downloading code that runs on a machine and in so doing embodies _the idea of Tezos_. In other words: Tezos is an implementation, and an ideal. We at Nomadic Labs are proud to have played a role in [the coalition of programmers that wrote](https://blog.nomadic-labs.com/announcing-octez.html#who) a Tezos implementation which is now widely used in the community. Historically, this was the first complete implementation of Tezos, which was used to activate Tezos Mainnet (the live blockchain) [back in 2018](https://tzstats.com/0). You can download this implementation from the open source repository [Tezos / tezos · GitLab](https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos/), where it is actively maintained today. However, we were so excited by this at the time that — much like the Romans — we neglected to distinguish linguistically between the ideal, and the implementation of that ideal. This may be forgivable for world-spanning preindustrial empires, but we modern software developers should be more precise. So … ## The implementation is **Octez** ; the standard is **Tezos** We are happy to announce that the bundle of concrete code files maintained at [Tezos / tezos · GitLab](https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos/) now has a name: **Octez**. ‘Octez’ is a portmanteau of octopus and Tezos, a pun which draws inspiration from [this big picture of Tezos](http://tezos.gitlab.io/shell/the_big_picture.html).[1](https://blog.nomadic-labs.com/announcing-octez.html#fn:logo) ![The big picture](https://blog.nomadic-labs.com/images/202106-octez-announcement/octopus.svg) ‘Octez’ is also a portmanteau of OCaml and Tezos (OCaml being the main programming language used in Octez), and a pun on ‘octet’. ## Octez, in more detail Octez is an [implementation](https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos/) of [a suite of Tezos-related software](http://tezos.gitlab.io/introduction/howtouse.html#the-binaries). It lives in this GitLab repo: [Tezos / tezos · GitLab](https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos/). Octez includes: 1. a Tezos node (which you may know as `tezos-node`); 2. a Tezos client for this node (`tezos-client`); 3. an implementation of the [environment for the economic protocol](http://tezos.gitlab.io/shell/the_big_picture.html#the-economic-protocol-environment-and-compiler); 4. daemons (baker, accuser and endorser) for protocols which are active on Mainnet; 5. a remote signer (`tezos-signer`); 6. and further tools, such as an encoder-decoder for Tezos data types (`tezos-codec`); `tezos-protocol-compiler`; and `tezos-validator`. Everything in [the big picture above](https://blog.nomadic-labs.com/announcing-octez.html#image) is Octez, except for - the Network (underneath the legs), - the Explorer (bottom right), and - the economic protocol (the green bit with PROTOCOL written in it) — though Octez is distributed with the economic protocols of Mainnet for convenience.[2](https://blog.nomadic-labs.com/announcing-octez.html#fn:protocol) ## Origin of the implementation Octez was created by a coalition of teams including [Nomadic Labs](https://www.nomadic-labs.com/), [Tarides](https://tarides.com/), [Tocqueville Group](https://tqtezos.com/), [Obsidian Systems](https://obsidian.systems/), [Tweag](https://www.tweag.io/), and [Metastate](https://metastate.dev/) (non-exclusive list). The work is coordinated by the [merge team](http://tezos.gitlab.io/developer/merge_team.html) ([list of members here](https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos/-/project_members)), and the name Octez was proposed to and approved by them. This reflects the decentralized nature of Tezos: Octez is a decentralized implementation, and the name itself was chosen in collaboration. ## Why Choose a Name Now? When we release a new version of [Tezos / tezos · GitLab](https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos/) we may say something like > version 9.2 has just been released This invites the question: Version 9.2 of what? The answer is > Version 9.2 of the Tezos implementation that lives at [Tezos / tezos · GitLab](https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos/), which is a bit of a mouthful. So henceforth we can write > Version 9.2 of [Octez](https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos/), with a clear conscience, complete precision — and our [SEO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization) officer would feel better about it too, if we had one. Thanks for reading … and keep an eye out for a future post titled “Releasing version 10.0 of Octez”! 1. This same picture inspired the [Nomadic Labs logo](https://web.archive.org/web/20210428215344im_/https://nomadic-labs.com/images/logo.png). [↩](https://blog.nomadic-labs.com/announcing-octez.html#fnref:logo) 2. See for example the [files for the Florence economic protocol](https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos/-/tree/master/src/proto_009_PsFLoren/lib_protocol), which is what Mainnet is running at time of writing. [↩](https://blog.nomadic-labs.com/announcing-octez.html#fnref:protocol)