I was just wondering why Pentaho PDI has many names such as spoon, kettle and Pentaho PDI what is the real name of this tool? (I'm talking about the tool to extract data from certain data source and modify and migrate to another location)
As dirk said - basically PDI started out life as any other independent open source product. The naming schema of these products is typically quite jokey. You can clearly see the reason for the original naming - everything being related to things you do in the kitchen. For example - you use a spoon to mix your recipe, and spoon is the tool to make your ETL. So it's actually a pretty useful naming scheme.
Obviously when Pentaho came along they needed something more professional. Hence PDI was created.
In reality everyone still uses the old names. (Even pentaho - look at the jira, github, and shell script names!)
I'm surprised there is both a kettle and a pdi tag on here actually! they should be merged!