Why is Eclipse called Eclipse

Here is my friday 'Why is' blog entry, this week I have looked up why Eclipse is called Eclipse. There are a few articles I have seen for the naming of Eclipse. It of course has an excellent name which would hint at the project eclipsing Sun's efforts at creating an IDE for Java but rumour has it this isn't how it got it's name.

This is a quote from What's in a Name article, a link to it is below

"It turned out Sun wasn't the target of the Eclipse moniker, though. In his keynote at the EclipseCon 2005 conference in March, Lee Nackman, chief technology officer and vice president of Design, Construction, and Test Tools at IBM's Rational Software division, said Microsoft Corp. was actually the company IBM wanted to "eclipse" and was the true object of IBM's attention."

I have also said read somewhere that they called the project Eclipse not because it would eclipse Microsoft's Visual Studio or Sun's NetBeans but that some one at IBM said that it would Eclipse anything that they had done before. I nice romantic sounding story.

The name you think isn't that important but in 2003, Sun Microsystems it was rumoured where going to join the Eclipse Foundation but said it would join the foundation whilst it was still named Eclipse. The also officially said they were working on their own IDE, which is probably more likely.

I have found two interesting article about the naming of Eclipse

What's in a name?

This article is a good background on Eclipse

The Eclipse Phenomenon

You can also check out the Eclipse history and other stuff at their site although I prefer to spend time looking at all the plugins myself