Not a tech company despite their ambitions, but many Volkswagen models are named for winds (in German):

* Golf - Gulf Stream,

* Jetta - Jet Stream,

* Passat - Trade wind,

* Polo - Polar winds,

* Scirocco - Mediterranean/Saharan wind.

Huh? "Polo"! How elegant. Too bad the evidence for it seems to be basically hearsay.

Maybe someone digs up a German source? Would be a cool addition to the Polo's Wikipedia articles. (The German Wikipedia says it's after sport not after the polar wind, but it's entirely unsourced.)

It was received wisdom to me, but on closer inspection, it seems to be all nonsense: https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2013/05/inside-the-industr...

My apologies!

Apple's big cat theme was the funniest one with Puma, Panther and Mountain Lion all referring to the exact same animals that happens to be known by the same name.

I enjoyed Craig Federighi‘s joke name for macOS 11, Sea Lion, back before switched the naming convention.

Debian releases are Toy Story characters.

Ubuntu releases are always alliterative Adjectival Animals (assigned alphabetically).

This naming scheme seemed extremely shortsighted to me as it wreaks havoc on Internet text searches. It forces one to search for numerous possible references to a release: the adjective alone, the animal name alone, the release number, maybe abbreviations or nicknames of the code name, and so on.

You know there's also a version number, always worked great for me.

The issue I have more often is that APT repos generally are just named "jammy" or such, and then you have to remember which release that was.

Background for the curious:

> So, what's with the "Funky Fairy" naming system? Many sensible people have wondered why we chose this naming scheme. It came about as a joke on a ferry between Circular Quay and somewhere else, in Sydney, Australia:

> lifeless: how long before we make a first release?

> sabdfl: it would need to be punchy. six months max.

> lifeless: six months! thats not a lot of time for polish.

> sabdfl: so we'll have to nickname it the warty warthog release.

> And voila, the name stuck.

(First Ubuntu release was "Ubuntu 4.10 - Warty Warthog")

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DevelopmentCodeNames

I'm surprised this is not mentioned on Ubuntu's wiki but this is called Alliteration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliteration

one project, RedHat/Fedora or something, was a pattern like "word A", "word B related to word A", "word C related to an alternate meaning of word B", etc.

Yes, both RedHat and Fedora used a free association-like naming scheme.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/History_of_Red_Hat_Linux

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/name_history/

(Vouched for parent comment since it was on-topic.)

VLC Media Player uses Discworld character names.

Some car manufacturers have coherent names.

For instance, consider BMW.

For sedans/hatchbacks there's basically 1 through 8 (1 series, 2 series etc). Even numbered series tend to be high performance models and are usually coupes.

Prefix "X" means it's an SUV.

Prefix "I" means it's electric.

The suffix "i" stands for petrol engine, "d" for diesel, "e" for plugin hybrids (?).

The other numbers indicate the relative performance of the engine (ie., 530 > 525)

"x-drive" means AWD.

An "M" in there means high performance. If there's "competition" tacked on, there's even more performance, and "CS" means it's really badass.

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BMW is not the only one with a coherent naming though. Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volvo etc (just naming a few) also have similar naming strategies.

Flash Player releases toward their later years were codenamed after San Francisco street names, in alphabetical order (a bit like Android's alphabetical dessert names).

Another fun thematic one from that era was Adobe's Flex platform, which had two separately codenamed parts: an SDK and an IDE. One release cycle both codenames were food related: Burrito and Hero (like the sandwich). So the follow-on minor release of course used the codenames Super Burrito and Superhero. The overall platform got the codename Superstar (i.e. "Super *"). And then I think the next release after that became "Megastar." As far as I know none of that was planned in advance, much like the story above.

AMD names their processors on italian cities while ServiceNow names their releases on big cities (they have Berlin and Paris and maybe had one on an indian one, but I don't remember).

AMDs server processors are named after italian cities (Bergamo, Turin, ...), their desktop and laptop CPUs and APUs are painters (Van Gogh, Renoir, Cezanne, ...), but that hasn't been entirely been consistent (e.g. the latest threadripper pro is code named Chagall which refers to a painter, but previous ones had names like Whitehaven).

There's Google with dessert themed names for Android versions

Google has been pretty bad with released product names, e.g. YouTube Red, Google Wave, G Suite, Google Assistant, Google Home Hub... not very creative

There is no "Google" for these purposes. Every org has their own practices and there's minimal central review. GFoo is in vogue in some parts of the company, but you won't see that branding in YouTube, Chrome, Android, Fuschia, etc.

Unfortunately, they stopped doing this after Android 9 Pie (2018). All subsequent Android versions are just referred to by version number.

They should have gone with Android "Quark"...

AMD Linux graphics driver developers use(d) their own naming scheme (separeate from the hardware codenames) for RDNA2 GPUs based on X11 colors and fish names to make it harder to speculate on unreleased hardware based off the open source drivers. This gave us Sienna Cichlid, Navy Flounder, Dimgrey Cavefish, Beige Goby and Yellow Carp. It seems they stopped doing that for the upcoming RDNA 3 cards though.

They started such a theme with Android Studio - not since the very beginning, but 2020. So far there have been Arctic Fox, Bumblebee, and Chipmunk.

The themes are fine but the issue i have with mac os codenames (this can apply to anything else though) is that it would be good to keep them alphabetically ordered so you instantly know how recent/old any version is.

Some are collected at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_name#Commercial

Wordpress does Jazz musicians.

Intel used to use names from various locations around Oregon (Coppermine, Katamai, etc).

AMD used to use horse breed names for various Athlon XP models.

Linux Mint is unfortunately named with female names. It’s creepy because leadership is mostly male, and because, by design, people are expected to move on to the next new “release”.