How did selenium get it’s name?

On these days,in the world of QA every one would heard about the buzz word called “Selenium”. The name comes from a fantastic incident. During the development of selenium core there was another   competitive product was developed  by a company called Mercury Interactive( Later it has acquired by HP and then that product renamed as QTP). So the Selenium team were in a urge to name their product in such a way to the mock their Competitive product. As we all know that the selenium is used to remove the toxic content mercury from the human body, so Jason coined the term Selenium for their creative opensource project. This is how it gets the name Selenium.

Note: The idea of this post has pop up-ed  in my mind after i meet Mr Nitesh Maheswari (the one from Mercury Interactive) yesterday. 🙂