Yesterday I had an interesting conversation about the meaning(lessness) of several software project names, such as the well-known PHP, Wine and others, but also smaller projects like OSUOSL's RAIV.
As it turns out, every fancy project name is also an acronym. That's something that got really popular among Open Source projects, and even though some people argue it is kind of lame, it is nice to see how many more or less meaningful project names and acronyms have come up over time.
A very nice one I learned about yesterday is: The TWAIN Scanner API, heavily used on Mac and Windows systems to connect image scanning devices to the operating system, is, when unraveled, simply:
Technology without an interesting name
:)
But there are also projects that are missing a "useful" solution for their "acronymic" name: I recently learned about the project called Oink. Oink is a collection of C++ static analysis tools and comes with a pretty awesome, still not-yet-"acronymed" name.
Anyone want to give it a shot?