Red hat have offices near there

Yep. Kristian Hoegsberg was driving through MA towns and just thought Wayland "sounded cool". Weston was named later.

> largely unrelated, but why is this and its reference compositor named after adjacent metro boston towns?

They were driving through Wayland when they came up with the idea for the project. (Wayland and Weston are neighboring towns and sports rivals, so it sort of fits to use Weston as the name of the reference implementation.)

wlroots -> wayland roots

rootston -> pun on weston, the official wayland reference compositor

Well, if you dug a bit deeper and checked out the github repo it stands for: "SirCmpwn's Wayland compositor" I think the reference you are trying to draw is unrelated.

Edit: Found it on Wikipedia. Ignore me but the Sway acronym still stands.