The original name was Picsou (Uncle Scrooge's name in French) because the parsing strategy is super greedy. We liked the name, but when we decided to open source it we thought it may be hard to pronounce, so we switched to Duckling (keeping the duck link...).
As an aside, I noticed it was renamed from "Picsou" (https://github.com/wit-ai/duckling/commit/0d9f666ae4da114803...)
Were you worried about getting scrooged by Disney? :)