FCKeditor, The Name
The FCK letters in FCKeditor are the initials of Frederico Caldeira Knabben, the project starter and lead developer of FCKeditor.
Frederico was used to use "fckVarName" while developing to indicate temporary things he introduced in the code. While living in Rome, his Italian co-workers were used to play with him point things like the "FCK Thing" because of it. So, in the late 2002, he decided to call his editor project "FCKeditor", as it fitted well with his friends jokes. The name sounded good in any case.
The Problem
Well, "FCKeditor" doesn't sounds always good really. It depends on the person reading it.
For native English speakers (Frederico is Brazilian), the FCK letters combined together are a shortcut for a bad word (probably the most used bad word in English). This information came to Frederico too late, after 2 years of FCKeditor, and the project was already too diffuse and mature to think about changing its name.
Many will say that the name is not a problem. The important is the quality of the software. This is true, but many others will feel the overall editor quality lower just because of that name fact. People may not understand how serious we are about FCKeditor, not taking us seriously because of it.
Rebranding
Changing the editor name right now is an extremely complex task. In the marketing point of view, it may be a bad decision, but it depends on the benefits it could bring.
We feel that we need to face this change. We want to make our editor perfect in all senses, so why not work on its name?
The New Name: CKEditor
After a long discussions at our forums, polls, and in-depth thoughs, we have defined the new name for the editor: CKEditor.
The "F" has been dropped from "FCK", and the "E" is now uppercased to avoid the confusion we had in the past.
Even if this name is not the perfect solution for a new editor product, it is proving to be the best compromise for a successful name changing in our case.
This change would also allow us following a product like with the CK prefix: CKEditor, CKFinder, CKPackager, etc.