Even worse, Kafka and Apache Kafka have almost no meaningful connection. According to Wikipedia, the author was reading (Franz) Kafka, who was a writer, and the software system is "optimized for writing". (Franz) Kafka wasn't "optimized" for anything, so this is just whimsical naming. It could just as well have been named Apache Hemingway, or Apache Tolstoy.
Whimsical naming is ok, but can also be confusing and annoying.
Wow, that's so unrelated. I think I'd tacitly assumed that it was named that because adopting an event-driven architecture results in byzantine and overly complicated software, like the bureaucracies in Kafka's novels.
I’d be shocked if your explanation wasn’t the real one. “Optimized for writing” sounds like the sort of justification you give when your project with a sarcastic self-deprecating name becomes surprisingly successful.
If they wanted to name it after a fast, efficient famous writer it would be Apache Hemingway.
Kafka died before most of his writing was published and most of it was destroyed, which doesn’t seem like something the software would want to be associated with, right?
... if you read Jay Krep's introduction to logs [1] (in the Kafka sense of logs) you can see that while he has a nice sense of humor [2], he felt pretty good about the Log abstraction and about Kafka. In no sense do I get the feeling he thought he was creating a kludge or something bad -- or "kafkaesque". Judging by the article, it might as well been named Apache Tolstoy!
[2] "'Each working data pipeline is designed like a log; each broken data pipeline is broken in its own way.' — Count Leo Tolstoy (translation by the author)"
Whimsical naming is ok, but can also be confusing and annoying.