Computing Magazine

Whats in a Name : Reason Behind Naming of Few Great Projects Part III

Posted on the 29 May 2013 by Abhishek Somani @somaniabhi

This is in continuation of my previous posts where i have listed the reason behind naming of several great projects.I have found some more languages , product and organization.You can read the posts here and here

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 Source Software Application Server".
In 1999, Marc Fleury started a free software project named EJB-OSS (Enterprise Java Bean Open Source 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."[WildFly Link][Wiki Source]

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![Source]

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.[wiki source]

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.[11] 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.[Source 1][Source 2]

Why Name RedHat:

RedHat is leader in open source and provides large range of open source 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.[Source]
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.
Do comment if you have any suggestion or more info about this or any other interesting project name stories !!
Whats in a name : Reason behind naming of few great projects Part III

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