Wikipedia, of all places, actually discusses this.
The idea is to make sure all package names are unique world-wide, by having authors use a variant of a DNS name they own to name the package. For example, the owners of the domain name joda.org
created a number of packages whose names begin with org.joda
, for example:
org.joda.time
org.joda.time.base
org.joda.time.chrono
org.joda.time.convert
org.joda.time.field
org.joda.time.format