Any suggestion how to name an opensource project.
How much is it advisable to simple make an abbreviation of the technology used and what you wish to achieve from it. Or recursive names like bing, gnu
Can anyone please mention some smart names of various project.
Whatever you name it, you will be stuck with that name forever.
So don't choose something silly, like 'Bruce'.
Some best example of names were voted on by a group. Of course, that sometimes makes it hard to choose from all the dissenting opinions.
Spend some time on it up front, give the naming some decent attention, then move on. The real benefit/contribution is in the content.
Other than that I have no advice. Opinions on "smart names" are subjective.
"Gurtle " comes to mind. A play on the word turtle (for Tortoise SVN" and google code. "g" for google, "urtle" for synonym of tortoise.
good luck.
Why not make a poll for all your potential users and/or developers to suggest and pick?
There are a bunch of different strategies for naming projects. Abbreviations and recursive acronyms have been covered, but keep in mind that a lot of the biggest (F)OSS projects have names that aren't acronyms or abbreviations: Firefox, Apache, Eclipse, Ubuntu.
It really depends on your target audience and what you're developing. If you're developing primarily for other tech people--say you're developing a compiler or library--a descriptive acronym or abbreviation might be the best way to go because it can tell people what your project does. If you're developing for a wider audience, keep in mind that abbreviations and (especially) recursive acronyms aren't necessarily going to be intelligible or meaningful to members of the general public.
In either case, there are a couple of things you should shoot for. If people can't remember the name of your project that's a bad thing: make it memorable. You don't want people getting your project confused with others (and you want it to be searchable from a major search engine): make it unique. You are probably going to want a good domain name too. In my experience finding a good domain name can be one of the hardest parts of choosing a name.
If you care about people finding your project via search engines, DON'T name it after a very common word -- if it becomes insanely popular it will eventually show up in search results, but it will be an uphill fight to get there. Check with a search engine that the name you like is either nowhere else in sight, or at least rare.
E.g. my popular project gmpy (a Python Multi-Precision extension) has no problems (top ten hits in a search for gmpy are all about my project -- a totally made up word, but fine since it interfaces existing library GMP with PYthon;-) -- but even gepy, the GEographic PYthon open source project I only did modest amounts of work on, about a year ago, still manages to make it (just barely;-) into the top ten hits (competing with a "GROUPEMENT sES EQUIPAGES PROFESSIONNELS sU YACHTING", and mostly my compatriot Giampiero Scalamogna's musical endeavors;-).