I can’t remember if I knew this before but someone recently mentioned that the Eclipse project was named as a dig on Sun Microsystems. Get it? Sun, Eclipse? I always questioned Sun’s lack of involvement in Eclipse. I don’t know if it was only the Eclipse project itself but I would say that the Eclipse supporting companies (like IBM, Oracle, and Borland) are eclipsing Sun in their Java-oriented businesses. Hostility aside, this is a good example of using an open source project as an opportunity for companies to collaborate and cooperatively force market change. Other examples include the many open source projects that were established as reference implementations to push forward a standard.
Other hostile open source project names:
Any others?
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I think Apache POI is another one
Thanks for the tip Michael! POI stands for “Poor Obfuscation Implementation”, which is a cut at how Microsoft intentionally tried to make it hard for other software to deal with their formats. Interestingly Microsoft later invested in the POI project. Either they have thick skin or they don’t read the Wikipedia.
On a similar note, I just noticed that the cover of the O’Reilly Maven book is an Anteater.