The longer story is that myself and a couple of guys from Italy (Stefano and Pier) took over Apache JServ, which was the only open source servlet engine at the time. We started to make some significant improvements and created Apache Java as an umbrella project. Apache made us some of the first non-httpd members.

We eventually got noticed by James Davidson at Sun, who was working on the servlet API and the reference implementation of that. Eventually, we decided to merge our efforts. Sun didn't like us using the Java (tm) name, so we picked the name of the conference room that we had the discussions in. That turned into renaming everything Apache Jakarta. It also involved giving us their reference implementation, which we named Apache Tomcat. The build system for Tomcat (because nothing good existed at the time) ended up turning into Apache Ant.

After insane amounts of work, we grew quite a bit as an organization. One day, I saw Doug Cutting working on the Lucene project and invited him under the Jakarta umbrella. That led to things like Hadoop and that whole ecosystem.

Edit: To clarify the JServ stuff. I had a web development company at the time. I wanted to work in Java and all the servlet stuff at the time was commercial products that were not very good. I found JServ, which one guy had built as a college/parttime project and then abandoned it, full of bugs and not finished.

So, I picked it up and started to work on fixes and then Stefano/Pier somehow found me. At the time, Apache didn't even have a way to host this stuff, so I ran it under my own (working-dogs.com) domain for about a year or so.

Eventually, through his work at Apache, Brian Behlendorf figured out there was a business in hosting code... so he started CollabNet. I quit my company and went to work with him and a bunch of other Apache folks. That's where subversion was created and Github eventually won that competition.

They needed to pick "some" name and went with the "Java island" naming option, rather than some "Java coffee" or other naming scheme.

Wikipedia:

The Eclipse Foundation could not agree with Oracle over the use of javax and Java trademarks.[5] Oracle owns the trademark for the name "Java" and the platform was renamed from Java EE to Jakarta EE.[6][7] The name refers to the largest city on the island of Java and also the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta.[8] The name should not be confused with the former Jakarta Project which fostered a number of current and former Java projects at the Apache Software Foundation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakarta_EE

Because it's a big city on island of Java?

The specification part means that in theory one can take code written for one container runtime and move it to another that offers better $nonFunctionalRequirement (or licensing story) without code changes

It has also been sliced and diced in to multiple profiles, popular among them is Microprofile. It can be implemented with Apache tomcat instead of heavier Websphere/ Weblogic etc.

Another thing that happened is container term which in Java world would be Servlet/EJB containers is now associated with Docker containers. And Java enterprise containers fell out of fashion.

All these factor led do Java/Jakarta EE being also ran.

I’m sure you have. Nearly everyone is using JPA and Quarkus is using JAX-RS via RESTEasy and other parts of the microprofile part of EE.