[mwmanning]

That's exactly the etymology. We were thinking about datacenters and servers. The original name was convox/kernel, but we thought it wasn't very descriptive.

The naming collision with the Ruby interface is unfortunate, but we figured it was pretty easy to tell them apart from context.

[ShaneOG]

Tbh I agree that as a descriptive name it works quite well.

However, it will muddy the waters for people trying to solve problems in future. For example, this tag on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/rack