To me the credit thing is less about "oh they made it so they deserve the credit", and more about spreading word about the free software movement. Software freedom is good, and GNU is all about software freedom, but people won't find that by searching for "Linux"
I mostly just had some rules for names I wanted to avoid: names of people I knew personally, names that sound weird/unusual in english or swedish (where I'm from).
I considered a bunch of names via the usual methods like baby name lists and random name generators but didn't find one that felt right for me, until one day one just occured to me
I seem to remember them saying 10 was going to be the last one, too