The name MAMP is an acronym representing the original components of the system: macOS, the operating system; Apache, the web server; MySQL, the database management system; and PHP, Perl, or Python, programming languages used for web development. The name is derived from LAMP, a similar stack of all open-source software widely used for web sites, but substituting proprietary macOS for open-source Linux. (Similar "AMP" stacks exist for other operating systems.)