I've been involved in many open software projects over the years. Some have been all my own work, some have been team efforts. In all cases, one of the first things to cause problems was the choice of a project name. It's a remarkably tricky process, and lots of projects seem to have fallen into one of the traps. With that in mind, here is Frank's Guide to Naming your Project:
Do your research first. Search for similar projects, think about what keywords worked, and what names people have chosen for your "competition". Unless your project is a fork or spin-off from another one, you should really try and make sure that you choose a name that's visibly and conceptually different from other similar projects. If you are designing the next big thing in build systems to rival the popular Ant, think twice before choosing "Amt", or "Insect". Imagine that in five years time you are in a battle for "mindshare" - do you want to remind everyone of other choices every time they see your project name?
Don't include the technology in the name. I know it's tempting; your whole reason for starting the project was to show that you can make a powerful application server in JavaScript for a mobile phone, but that will shine through in the code, the documents, and the description. Code, documents and description are expected to change (probably many times) during the life of a project. If you decide to broaden the scope of your mobile app server to include organizer devices as well as phones, or if you decide that ECMAScript is a more politically correct name, you need to be free to change and adapt. The single hardest thing to change is the project name - don't tie it down.
Don't use the name of another project. You'd think this would be common sense, yet I have seen several such clashes. Search for any name you are considering and make sure it's not alreay taken. Even some backwater website with no updates in three years could still confuse your users. And think how much worse it would be if that other project got more popular than yours.
Checkout domain names first. If your project become popular you are going to want a top-level web site for it. You don't want to find you are in a fight with a European frozen food manufacturer for that perfect domain. If you are serious about the project, find a vacant domain and grab it now. Make sure to also check out the same name with different suffixes, though. If whatever.com and whatever.net are "adult" sites, it may not be a good idea to take whatever.org for your geek software.
Make sure people can say it. Don't underestimate the number of times a project might be mentioned over the phone or in a meeting. If the spelling and the pronunciation is obvious you have a much better chance of being remembered correctly.
Don't use a dictionary word or a person's name. It's astonishingly compelling. I know I've done it. It's so tempting to take a twist on the idea of a project, and find a regular word that fits. I've got a small knowledge-base called inkling, a content management system called barrel, and a site portal called Wayne. All of these are bad names, as you'll see if you try a search on google - can't see my project there :(
Don't use abbreviations. If you can't think of a single-word name for your project, please don't be tempted to use an abbreviation or acronym which breaks any of the above rules, especially if you "forget" that it was once an acronym and treat it as a real name. A classic example of this is Jess, the Java rule engine. A great project, but really hard to find on Google.
Don't EVER use "stealth" words. Stealth words are words so common that they slip in "under the radar" of the search engines. Search engines don't even bother to index them, because they are found in almost every page on the internet. For this reason, they are the worst possible names for projects. At least with "Jess" you can find it if you add enough qualifiers, but imagine a project "Application-Neutral Deployment", known by the developers as "AND". However hard you try, you are not going to find it with regular search engines; "and" is an ultra-common stealth word, deliberately ignored in searches.
Recently, I think I have been choosing some better names. Examples include my web collaboration software "Friki" (gets top place in a google search, but the domain name was already taken), and a collection of useful stuff "Stringtree" (currently second hit on google, but I got the domain). With a bit of thought, you too can choose a project name that is easy to find, easy to get a domain for, easy to remember, and easy to grow.
Finally, don't forget to use the name sensibly. There is a lot of spam about at the moment which uses apparently random collections of words to fool "learning" spam filters. Be careful that emails about your projects don't get mistaken for this stuff. I'm on a mailing list for some Jini-related software and I often get messages with surreal subject lines such as "persistent outrigger". I'm sure some of these have just gone direct to the trash.
I hope these suggestions have made a bit of sense, and if even one project team considers them and helps reduce the proportion of dumb names at sourceforge, I'll be happy.