Eclipse originally used the names of the Galilean moons of Jupiter for its naming scheme, but after using Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede, they didn't want to use Io for several reasons (including that "I/O" already has a special meaning). So they went with Galileo, then decided to switch away from Galileo-related names entirely, but to try to stay in the astronomy family, hence "Helios," which was chosen well before the Sun/Oracle announcement was made. Now they're just going down the alphabet, which is why "Indigo" is next. I wouldn't be surprised to see "Jupiter" after that, just so they can get one more Jupiter/Galileo/astronomy reference in while it's easy...
As for the name "Eclipse," I can imagine that some people at IBM thought it might be funny to pick that name to poke at Sun, but I tend to believe them when they say that really isn't the case. The reason I believe them is that "Eclipse" could just as plausibly have been picked because they wanted to convey that their new IDE would "eclipse" the competition, which at the time was more JBuilder than any Sun product. I could see that one going either way. Or maybe they just wanted to jump in with what they thought was a cool-sounding name after Mitsubishi used it for cars, but before it also became a gum and a silly vampire movie targeting teenage girls... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
