Personally, i think their "pairs" ( gin and guice, nacl and pepper) are both effective and cute. As for the ones you mentioned, v8 is a faster JavaScript engine , which makes sense (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_engine ). Go is a language that is easy to get started with. Vp8, they inherited when they bought on2. I haven't used closure, and don't know much about it, but I'm guessing to those familiar with it, it makes sense.

At very least, their names are much more intuitive than, for example, apache software names