Top five head-scratchingest names for software projects

By Victoria Reitano

September 29, 2011 — (Page 1 of 2)
Hadoop, MySQL, Harmony and countless others. You've heard of these things every day in the news, or perhaps in your daily work life, and yet, do you know the origin of the names? Some may seem simple, while others may seem confusing. But we’ve talked to their creators to get to the bottom of this surprisingly sentimental trend.

MySQL
The story of MySQL (now owned by Oracle) sparked this article. At Agile2011, we spoke with Patric Palm of Hansoft, a company that provides agile project-management tools, and he provided the origin of the name for this open-source database.

MySQL was cofounded by Michael Widenius, whose daughter’s name is My (pronounced “Mia”), according to Palm.

The dolphin is named "Sakila,” which was chosen from a list of suggestions by users in a “Name the Dolphin” contest. Ambrose Twebaze, an open-source software developer from Swaziland, submitted the winning name. According to MySQL, Ambrose said the feminine name Sakila has its roots in siSwati, the local language in Swaziland.

Hadoop
Seems everyone knows the story of the Hadoop elephant, which was named after a toy elephant owned by creator Doug Cutting’s son. This Apache project contains a distributed computing platform and an implementation of MapReduce.

Related Search Term(s): Apache, Hadoop, Harmony, MySQL, OODT, Yay

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Comments

10/03/2011 12:29:46 PM EST

Neat article, but MySQL isn't an Apache project.

United StatesRichard

10/04/2011 11:44:32 PM EST

I am not sure if airavata is catchy enough for you to feature. But if interested, I can discuss our story of naming.

United StatesSuresh Marru

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache ACE as a Top-Level Project
Open Source OSGi software distribution framework especially suited for the Cloud and embedded computing markets Read More...