When Shakespeare wrote “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Sc 1), he hadn't seen the effects of modern marketing, consumer branding, and product positioning. Names are incredibly important to the positioning of a product. First impressions count for way too much, and (you'll be horrified to learn) people do indeed judge books by their covers.

Names sometimes arise from the most fortuitous of circumstances. Linus Torvalds (himself named after two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling) planned to call Linux “Freax” because it was free and freaky. But his friend Ari Lemmke gave him an FTP directory called /pub/OS/Linux, and the name stuck. While still at college, Red Hat founder Marc Ewing was given his grandfather's Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes). Marc lost track of it, and searched with increasing desperation. The manual for the original Red Hat Linux beta appealed to readers to return Marc's Red Hat if found. We're lucky that distribution isn't called Red-and-White-striped Lacrosse Cap Linux.

Would Java have been a runaway success if it was called “Oak”? It was called Oak for most of its early development years starting in 1991. James Gosling, the master programmer, Sun VP, and Sun Fellow behind the language, named it after the view from his office window. James's office was at 2180 Sand Hill Road, Palo Alto, California, on the fourth floor of the old Bank of America building. From the window he could see a large oak tree. When he needed a name for the language he was developing, what could be more handy than to look out of the window waiting for inspiration to strike?

The name Oak was short, natural, familiar, but it didn't have that edge, that buzz, that sizzle successful products need. But worse than that, years later, as Sun was planning to go public with Oak, the name failed a trademark search! There was a video card manufacturer called Oak Technology who held the rights. As a stop-gap, Oak was bogusly renamed to O.A.K. for Object Application Kernel. This was done so the source code didn't need to be changed, but a real name change was needed.

Oak was recognizably Java at this point. Patrick Naughton and Jonathan Payne had used it to create the Webrunner prototype web browser. The pair then got downloadable applets working in a weekend. By now it was January 1995, and the 1.0a2 semi-public alpha release was planned for March 1995. So a brainstorming session was called for all Oak team members, to come up with ideas for a new name. Table 16-1 is the shortlist taken into the meeting, and Java isn't even on it!

It was a impassioned meeting with a lot of suggestions and counter-suggestions hurled about. By now, the team had moved to new offices, the old DEC Western Research Lab at 100 Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto. If you visit this building, you'll see it looks more like a water pipe factory than an office. Like the Pompidou Center in Paris, it makes a feature of exposing all the ducts and piping. At some point someone (no one recalls who) suggested Java, after the favorite brew from Peets Coffeehouse nearby. Some people liked it, some people didn't but it was added to the list. When the company lawyers reviewed all the names, they cleared three possibilities from a trademark standpoint: Java, DNA, and Silk.

A vote was then held. Every person ranked the three names in their order of preference. The vote revealed that the name DNA got the most “most liked” and the most “least liked” votes. So DNA was dropped. James Gosling seemed to favor Java over Silk, and Java now got the most votes. Kim Polese, as product manager, had the final say over the name. After four years as Oak, just a few weeks before release, the new name was Java. Sun started the trademark process, free access on the web soon ignited a firestorm of interest, and this rose could have no better name.

As a postscript, I should mention that there are some other stories about where the name came from. I'm almost afraid to write this down, in case it gives the stories more currency. One story claims Java was derived from the initials of individuals involved in the project. It's nonsense. We can form a backronym for anything! Another story has one team member saying they alone thought of the name. None of the other team members recollect it that way.