Ever wondered about how the project , framework or product names are coined ? Why the particular name , what does it mean.Why name hibernate or hadoop or mule. Whenever i came across a new technology or framework , first i search the meaning of the name, sometimes, it gives a fairly good idea about what the product is about, thus giving you a better understanding about the technology, and sometimes it has some interesting and funny stories behind the naming. I have collected some famous projects and reasoning behind the names
Why name GIT :
According to WikiPedia
Linus Torvalds[The creator of git] has quipped about the name git, which is Irish slang for a child born out of wedlock, and British English slang for a stupid or unpleasant person. Torvalds said: "I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'git'."The man page describes git as "the stupid content tracker"
Why Name Android:
Meaning of Android is "(in science fiction) A robot with a human appearance. all the android versions[Jelly Bean,Ice Cream Sandwich,Honeycomb,Gingerbread,Froyo,Eclair,Donut] till date , are named after popular sweets.
Why Name Hibernate:
Its name seems logical because hibernate mean " Remain inactive or indoors for an extended period". Similarly the hibernate entities remains inactive for the period they are in database. There is no official reason about naming.
Why Name Spring :
According to Blog by Rod Johnson spring was coded with name "Interface21 framework" , but later changed to spring suggested by yann . The reason was one is association to nature and two it represents a fresh start after the “winter" of traditional J2EE.
Why Name Mule
Mule is a popular ESB provider.Here is the quote as to why it is named as mule
“After working on a couple of systems, I found that there was a lot of infrastructure work to be done. I regard this infrastructure work as “donkey work” as it needs doing for ev- ery project. I preferred Mule over Donkey and Ass just didn’t seem right ;-). A Mule is also commonly referred to as a carrier of load, moving it from one place to another. The load we specialize in moving is your enterprise information.” —Ross Mason, CTO & Co-Founder, Mule Inc.
Why Name Hadoop
Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting and Michael J. Cafarella.Doug, who was working at Yahoo at the time,[8] named it after his son's toy elephant.
Why name Camel
Listing few reason which are there on Apache camel site :
a Camel can travel for great distances without water; similarly a Camel does not require bucket loads of XML
a Camel looks really funny when its running, like most of the team
Don't get lost in a desert of XML config files, get Camel!
some members of the team used to love Camel cigarettes!
Why name Tomcat
Tomcat started off as a servlet reference implementation by James Duncan Davidson.He wanted to name the project after an animal. He came up with Tomcat since he reasoned the animal represented something that could fend for itself.Catalina is Tomcat's servlet container .Coyote is Tomcat's HTTP Connector component.Jasper is Tomcat's JSP Engine.
Why name Apache
The name 'Apache' was chosen from respect for the various Native American nations collectively referred to as Apache, well-known for their superior skills in warfare strategy and their inexhaustible endurance.The group of developers who released this new software soon started to call themselves the "Apache Group".
Apart from this , various java releases project names are based on mammels and birds while minor release names are based on insects[because they are bug fixes releases ].Java 5 release was named as Tiger , Java 6 as Mustang and java 7 as Dolphin .
Why Name AMAZON:
Amazon[need no introduction] was founded by Jeff Bezos. Bezos wanted a name for his company that began with "A" so that it would appear early in alphabetic order. He began looking through the dictionary and settled on "Amazon" because it was a place that was "exotic and different" and it was one of the biggest rivers in the world, as he hoped his company would be!
Why Name Geronimo :
Apache Geronimo is an open server runtime that integrates the best open projects to create Java/OSGi server runtime. Geronimo was an Apache leader who fought with US and mexico army.There is also a controversy that the U.S. operation to kill Osama bin Laden also used the code name "Geronimo".
Why Name Selenium :
The open Selenium web testing tool was named as a jab at its ostensible commercial rival, Mercury QuickTest Pro (Mercury was later bought by HP). Selenium mineral supplements are used as an antidote to mercury poisoning, and so was the test tool meant as an antidote to QTP!
Why Name DJango:
Django is a high-level Python Web framework and named after the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.
Why Name Perl:
Programming language Perl [created by Larry Wall]was originally named "Pearl". Wall wanted to give the language a short name with positive connotations; he claims that he considered (and rejected) every three- and four-letter word in the dictionary. He also considered naming it after his wife Gloria. Wall discovered the existing PEARL programming language before Perl's official release and changed the spelling of the name.
Why Name Ruby:
Ruby was conceived on February 24, 1993 by Yukihiro Matsumoto who wished to create a new language that was more powerful than Perl, and more object-oriented than Python.The main factor in choosing the name "Ruby" was because it was the birthstone of one of his colleagues
Why Name Mozilla :
Mozilla was the mascot of the now disbanded Netscape Communications Corporation.The name "Mozilla" was already in use at Netscape as the codename for Netscape Navigator 1.0. The term came from a combination of "Mosaic killer" (as Netscape wanted to displace NCSA Mosaic as the world's number one web browser) and Godzilla. Apparently , Firefox , the flagship product of mozilla went through several name changes . Originally titled Phoenix , then changed to firebird and now firefox.
Why Name Yahoo!
The word "Yahoo" was invented by Jonathan Swift for the Travels.The name Yahoo! purportedly stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Jerry Yang and David Filo insist they selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.The very first name of yahoo was "Akebono"[name of legendary Hawaiian sumo wrestlers].Yahoo name was already registered with someone else so a exclamation mark was put and made it yahoo!.
Why Name Windows:
The name Windows fits into that philosophy. At the time of its original release late in 1985, most operating systems were single-tasking, text-only, and ran from a command line--like DOS if you remember that. Graphic user interfaces (GUIs) were still new. The Mac, less than two years old at that time, was the only GUI-based system enjoying commercial success. The word windows simply described one of the most obvious differences between a GUI and a command-line interface.
Why Name Pramati
For those who don't know , pramati build application servers , just like JBOSS , APACHE etc. Pramati is a Sanskrit word which means "Exceptional Minds". I worked there as a java developer :) .
Why Name Scala
The name Scala is a blend of "scalable" and "language", signifying that it is designed to grow with the demands of its users. James Strachan, the creator of Groovy, described Scala as a possible successor to Java .
Why Name JBOSS AS:
JBoss Application Server is one of the most popular Java EE complaint server. The Term Jboss is short form of "JavaBeans Open Software Application Server".
In 1999, Marc Fleury started a free software project named EJB-OSS (Enterprise Java Bean Open Software) implementing the EJB API from J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition). Sun Microsystems asked the project to stop using the EJB trademark within its name. EJB-OSS was then renamed to JBOSS, then JBoss later
Now the Jboss AS is renamed to Wildfly . All further releases of the JBOSS AS 7.1.1 Final will be named as wildfly .This name was chosen from a public voting among other names(BaseJump ,jBeret ,Petasos ,Jocron ) and the reason behind the name is "A wild fly is extremely agile, lightweight, untamed and truly free."
Why Name JIRA:
Jira is one of the most popular project and bug tracking tool developed by atlassian. The reason behind naming the project is :
We originally used Bugzilla for bug tracking and the developers in the office started calling it by the Japanese name for Godzilla, Gojira (the original black-and-white Japanese Godzilla films are also office favourites). As we developed our own bug tracker, and then it became an issue tracker, the name stuck, but theGo got dropped - hence JIRA!
Why Name Ubuntu:
Ubuntu is a operating system based on debian linux distribution.It is named after southern african philosophy ubuntu. According to their official web site :
Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning 'humanity to others'. It also means 'I am what I am because of who we all are'. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers.
Why Name Wikipedia:
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.Sanger coined the name Wikipedia, which is a combination of wiki and encyclopedia .The word wiki (a website which allows people to add, modify, or delete the content via a web browser usually using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor) came from Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb.
WikiWikiWeb was the first wiki.Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in Portland, Oregon, in 1994, and installed it on the Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, "I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.
Why Name RedHat:
RedHat is leader in open and provides large range of open products to enterprise community. It has also acquired JBOSS.The reason behind the name RedHat is :
In an interview with Red Hat Magazine, co-founder Bob Young said that the red hat has long been a symbol of freedom, with revolutionaries in both America and France donning red caps during their uprisings. "There is a tradition in western history of red being the symbol of liberation and challenge of authority," he says in the taped interview. As for the name Red Hat specifically, fellow co-founder Marc Ewing also had an affinity for red hats and wore his grandfather's red lacrosse hat during his time at Carnegie Mellon.
The Fedora project created in 2003 when Red Hat Linux(Community Distribution ) was discontinued.A fedora is a kind of hat most commonly worn by men.