Did you ever wondered where do popular Open Source projects got their name from? Like why is MySQL named MySQL? And not FooSQL?
This repository contains the history and reason how various Open Source projects got their name.
Table of Contents
[...] The name MySQL (just like the MyISAM storage engine) comes from Monty's first daughter "My". [...]
Monty in the above quote is Michael Widenius.
Source: Why is the Software Called MariaDB? @ MariaDB Knowledgebase (former AskMonty Knowlesgebase)
The 'MySQL' name is trademarked by Oracle, and they have chosen to keep that trademark to themselves. The name MySQL (just like the MyISAM storage engine) comes from Monty's first daughter "My". MariaDB continues this tradition by being named after his younger daughter.
Monty in the above quote is Michael Widenius.
Source: Why is the Software Called MariaDB? @ MariaDB Knowledgebase (former AskMonty Knowlesgebase)
The QID which identifies a thing in Wikidata is using the letter Q as Denny Vrandečić's wife's name starts with a Q. Denny is one of the founding members of Wikidata.
Source: mentioned by Denny Vrandečić in the German documentary "Wikipedia - Die Schwarmoffensive" by Maria Teresa Curzio
The name my kid gave a stuffed yellow elephant. Short, relatively easy to spell and pronounce, meaningless, and not used elsewhere: those are my naming criteria.
Source: Doug Cutting, co-founder of Apache Hadoop, quoted in Hadoop: The Definitive Guide by Tom White
I thought that since Kafka was a system optimized for writing using a writer's name would make sense. I had taken a lot of lit classes in college and liked Franz Kafka. Plus the name sounded cool for an open source project.
The name Kubernetes originates from Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot. K8s as an abbreviation results from counting the eight letters between the "K" and the "s". [...]
Source: Kubernetes website "What is Kubernetes?"
The tool we had been working on for a while was still called urlget in the beginning of 1998 but as we just recently added FTP upload capabilities that name turned wrong and I decided cURL would be more suitable. I picked ‘cURL’ because the word contains URL and already then the tool worked primarily with URLs, and I thought that it was fun to partly make it a real English word “curl” but also that you could pronounce it “see URL” as the tool would display the contents of a URL.
Much later, someone (I forget who) came up with the “backronym” Curl URL Request Library which of course is totally awesome.
Source: cURL, 17 years old today @ Daniel Stenberg blog
Debian was begun in August 1993 by Ian Murdock, as a new distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU. [..] Debian is pronounced /ˈde.bi.ən/. It comes from the names of the creator of Debian, Ian Murdock, and his wife, Debra.
Source About Section - Official Debian Homepage
Taylor Otwell was searching for a random word to name the project. He was playing a game at this time. Inside the game, he had a boat, a caravelle. He asked himself, "What rhymes with that?". He came up with "Laravel" and thought, "That sounds like something I would use [...] that sounds like a professional development framework".
Source: Laravel Origins: The Documentary (Minute 05:05 - 05:52)