AITA for naming 2nd son after friend but not naming 1st son after FIL?

Me (F27) and my husband (M30) just had our second child. For our first son (m3) we picked a cute generic name that we both loved. This caused a lot of drama in his family as husband has the same name as his dad, grandfather and great grandfather.

His dad always emphasized that it was “our choice” to continue the name or not. Apparently that was all talk because when we didn’t name our son after him my in-laws blew up. They flat out ignore our son and started spreading lies and gossip about son maybe not being husbands. *mega eye roll* He’s literally the spitting image of his dad.

In case it matters, husband and I discussed continuing the name back when we were dating. My husband doesn’t go by his full name, always a nickname as he doesn’t really care for it.

I didn’t particularly like the the name either (think of the most popular 2 names historically, like ”John William Smith” and that’s basically it.) so we decided long before getting married that we wouldn’t be continuing the name.

Here’s where I think we might be AH. We recently had a close family friend get diagnosed with a terminal illness. This man has been instrumental in my husbands career, we’ve become close friends with their kids and our son/their grandkids play together all the time. I cannot stress enough how incredible this couple has been to our lives.

When we found out we were having another boy and were tossing around names, a variation of this man’s name came up. We both loved it. It’s old fashioned but still unique without being weird. Inevitably when we announced the name our families asked where we got it from. We told them honestly that we named him after x man because 1 we liked the name and 2 he’s been a big roll in our life.

Husbands family got all huffy and his dad got really quiet and excused himself. I didn’t realize until then that it might have felt kind of like a diss at his dad since we didn’t continue the family name, but honored someone else with our second son. Are we the AH?

TDLR:
Discontinued family name, but chose to name other son after family friend.