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Comment by scarcely | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic, but I feel that when naming one's technical creation it's best to avoid using the last names of famous people especially when that person has become so famous it's become standard to refer to him/her simply by last name. Just google "Kafka" and check out the first page of search results and you'll see what I mean. (No, googling "Franz Kafka" isn't the same)

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Are you objecting that Franz Kakfka is buried by Apache Kafka, or vice versa?

Either which way, when I google "Kafka" Franz Kafka is the third result, hardly buried.

Results about Apache Kafka are of interest only to a subgroup of software engineers. Results about Franz Kafka are of interest to a much larger group of people (Frankly, there is simply no comparison). It's the considerate thing to do.

And it's not simply a matter of the ordinary person having to type an extra word. There exist tons of valuable web resources (literary analysis, criticism, journal articles) out there about the novelist that does not contain "Franz" anywhere.

Finally, it's not like there's an absolute need for any piece of software to be given any particular name.

Everyone knows you are supposed to use a stupid spelling for your stupid app / company / product anyway.

kaPHka

I agree completely. Similarly, I have no idea why the creators of GIMP and CockroachDB (Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell for the latter) thought those names were the best possible options.

CockroachDB at least refers to their marketing line of "almost impossible to kill/take down" and the way it scales to many servers. There are few less gross insects they could have used though like Bees or Ants.

Bees and ants don't have anywhere near the same rep for invincibility. Only one of those animals is a stereotypical nuclear apocalypse survivor.

They should have went with Water Bears. It can survive even in space. Plus they sound cute (but look scary).

We have a conference room named Tardigrade.

But any of those are infinitely better than naming something after a letter of the alphabet. That would be a crazy idea, wouldn't it?

(Sorry to all the users of 'R' and 'C' and 'S' and ...) :(

Bee DB is catchy, but would probably violate some sort of Buck Rogers IP

GIMP is an acronym (backronym?) for the GNU Image Manipulation Program. So I guess to blame GNU if you’re not a fan of GIMP’s name.

I actually thought that CockroachDB had some relation to Apache Kafka from the name (like Apache Samza does). But nope!

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