Not the greatest choice of name: Moloch[a] (also Molech, Mollok, Milcom, or Malcam) is the biblical name of a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice, through fire or war.
I think this is a bit distracting. It's an ancient name. Probably a better paragraph to fixate on would be:
> Moloch has been used figuratively in English literature from John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) to Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1955), to refer to a person or thing demanding or requiring a very costly sacrifice.
I mean a project called Zeus would hardly founder on it's namesakes fetish for turning into a bull and assaulting human women.
Interesting, newer knew the word is of biblical origin. In German the word Moloch is in somewhat common use to refer to an abstract merciless, all-consuming or all devouring power.
E.g big cities might get referred to as molochs the way they eat into nature around it or suck people into its anonymity
I was thinking the same. In German Moloch is mostly used for groteskly big/growing cities. But thinking about it, the "eating into nature"-theme aligns well with the biblical "eating into kids"-theme.
For me at least, because of the city-context, Moloch matches: The moloch could stand for the amount of activity in a system that is humanly insurmountable to get a better-than-superficial understanding of.
I didn't have that strong of an association of Moloch with big cities as it felt like when I looked it up for the above answer, so I googled a bit of its usage on news sites and it looks like in Germany it is almost exclusively used for big cities, whereas in Switzerland, cities is the most common usage but it is applied way more liberally.
Within a minute or so I saw it used to refer to: The EU, a government bicycle program, a 2km long tunnel in Zürich, iTunes, the Tour de France, Goldman Sachs and fashion.
Reminds me of when someone saw that the NSA's public key (http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html) to be included in Lotus Notes had an organizational name of "MiniTruth", and a common name of "Big Brother".
Moloch isn't the good guy in Howl.
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
which is the same referent, and begs the same question: "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?"
It's an inside joke to the Deep State that actively needs captures of network data, AOL... is a Verizon company after all. In these discordian times, even Eris would blush.
Funny you mentioned the deep state. I remember being perturbed that the email leak from the 2016 race had references to child-sacrifice moloch. Strange times
Naming open source projects is a challenging task. The team hears this all the time, but hey, open source is about code you can use, a community you can join to make the code better, and the pride that people around the world want to use your code. If you are on a blue-team, you'll want to look at this project. If you are making lists of names that distract attention this goes on it.
If someone names their CLI JDahmer which then requires me to use it jdahmer <command> <options>, it is going to cringe me out.
That said, I totally respect the project's decision to name it so. I'm sorry if it comes off as an outrage or an unnecessary rant. I understand it takes away the energy which is otherwise better spent on a constructive discussion of this excellent project, which is also surprisingly well-maintained. But, I hope you realise why the name is controversial, especially since everyone that has to use the project has to get used to seeing/reading/using/typing Moloch everywhere from the docs, to the CLI, to the FAQ pages, and what-not.
May be the project can explain their rationale in a separate webpage (if they want to) and that might help?
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch