It was probably a sequence of thoughts, but the flash gordon | alf relationship is parallel, they're unrelated above the convergence point that is shumway.
There was another open-source Flash Player clone called "Gordon" (i.e. Flash Gordon). The founder of Gordon, Tobias Schneider, joined Mozilla to work on Shumway, the successor to Gordon.
I'd be highly surprised if it were a new software naming method, it's definitely not a new thing of itself.