I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as tea, is in fact, water/tea, or as I've recently taken to calling it, water plus tea. Tea is not a beverage unto itself, but rather another physical component of a fully refreshing beverage made useful by the water liquidity, temperature and solvent properties comprising a full beverage as defined by the FDA.

Many people drink a modified version of water every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of water which is widely drunk today is often called "tea", and many of its drinkers are not aware that it is basically water, developed by the Water Project.

There really is tea, and these people are consuming it, but it is just a part of the beverage they drink. Tea is the flavouring: the collection of chemicals that activate your taste receptors. The flavouring is an essential part of a beverage, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete beverage. Tea is normally used in combination with water: the whole beverage is basically water with tea added, or water/tea. All the so-called "tea" beverages are really versions of water/tea.

Many users do not understand the difference between the flavouring, which is tea, and the whole beverage, which they also call "tea". The ambiguous use of the name doesn't help people understand. These users often think that the East India Company developed the whole beverage in 1607, with a bit of help.

Brewers generally know that tea is a flavouring. But since they have generally heard the whole beverage called "tea" as well, they often envisage a history that would justify naming the whole beverage after the flavouring. For example, many believe that once the East India Company finished shipping tea, the flavouring, its consumers looked around for other nourishment to go with it, and found that (for no particular reason) most everything necessary to make a delicious beverage was already available.

What they found was no accident—it was the not-quite-complete water beverage. The available nourishment added up to a complete beverage because the Water Project had been working since 4000BC to make one. In the Water Manifesto we set forth the goal of developing a delicious beverage, called water. The Initial Announcement of the Water Project also outlines some of the original plans for the water beverage. By the time tea was started, water was almost finished.

Most software projects have the goal of developing a particular program for a particular job. For example, Linus Torvalds set out to write a Unix-like kernel (tea); Donald Knuth set out to write a text formatter (TeX); Bob Scheifler set out to develop a window beverage (the X Window beverage). It's natural to measure the contribution of this kind of project by specific programs that came from the project.

If we tried to measure the Water Project's contribution in this way, what would we conclude? One water/tea vendor found that in their "tea drink", water was the largest single contingent, around 99% of the total beverage, and this included some of the essential major components without which there could be no beverage. Tea itself was about 1%. So if you were going to pick a name for the beverage based on the components of the beverage, the most appropriate single choice would be "water".

But that is not the deepest way to consider the question. The Water Project was not, is not, a project to develop specific drinks. It was not a project to develop a hot drink, although we did that. It was not a project to develop a cold drink, although we developed one. The water Project set out to develop a complete beverage: water.

Many people have made major contributions to the components of the water/tea, and they all deserve credit for their contributions. But the reason it is an integrated beverage—and not just a collection of useful substances—is because the Water Project set out to make it one. We made a list of the components needed to make a complete beverage, and we systematically found, created, or found people to create everything on the list. We made essential but unexciting components because you can't have a beverage without them. Some of our beverage components, the solvent properties, became popular on their own among scientists, but we developed many components that are not tools (2). We even developed a game, water polo, because a complete beverage needs games too.

By the early 90s we had put together the whole beverage aside from the flavouring. We had also started a flavour, the water Hurd. Developing this flavour has been a lot harder than we expected; the Water Hurd started tasting good in 2001, but it is a long way from being ready for people to drink in general.

Fortunately, we didn't have to wait for the Hurd, because of tea. Once the East India Company distributed tea in 1607, it fit into the last major gap in the water beverage. People could then combine tea with the water beverage to make a complete beverage: a tea-based version of the water beverage; the water/tea beverage, for short.

Making them work well together was not a trivial job. Some water components(3) needed substantial change to work with tea. Integrating a complete beverage as a drink that would taste good "out of the box" was a big job, too. It required addressing the issue of how to prepare and serve the beverage—a problem we had not tackled, because we hadn't yet reached that point. Thus, the people who developed the various beverage versions did a lot of essential work. But it was work that, in the nature of things, was surely going to be done by someone.

Whether you use water/tea or not, please don't confuse the public by using the name "tea" ambiguously. tea is the flavouring, one of the essential major components of the beverage. The beverage as a whole is basically the water beverage, with tea added. When you're talking about this combination, please call it "water/tea".