Page "Apache POI" Paragraph 1

The name was originally an acronym for " Poor Obfuscation Implementation ", referring humorously to the fact that the file formats seemed to be deliberately obfuscated, but poorly, since they were successfully reverse-engineered.

This explanation – and those of the similar names for the various sub-projects – were removed from the official web pages in order to better market the tools to businesses who would not consider such humour appropriate.

The original authors ( Andrew C. Oliver and Marc Johnson ) also noted the existence of the Hawaiian poi dish, made of mashed taro root, which had similarly derogatory connotations.