Hacker News Reader

Comment by aoloe | Hacker News Reader

For the 87% of the world population that is not native English speaking, Gimp just means nothing, except a fine image manipulation program...

(and we had to Google for BDSM. It does not seem to be a BSD Unix variant... and now that I think about it: it might be the reason why FreeBSD is not so popular!)

Not only I'm pretty sure that there is an Indic / Chinese language spoken by hundreds of milions people, where Inkscape is a bad word...

Also -- even if in my eyes it's a bit childish from the Gimp team to stick to what seems to be perceived as a bad name -- i perceive as even more childish that people keep on complaining that an acronym means something "bad" in their language.

Next time you come to the south of Switzerland, I'll invite you for a joyful train ride from Locarno to Domodossola: http://www.centovalli.ch/?lang=EN

View on HN

> "i perceive as even more childish that people keep on complaining that an acronym means something "bad" in their language"

I don't usually complain about it, I'm just being honest about it having an effect on how much I promote it. In other words, I talk about it less because of its name. I also doubt I'm the only one. You can paint this as irrational if you want, but if the idea is to promote a free alternative to Photoshop (which makes Gimp a very useful project for the open-source community) it seems a little off to reduce its popularity over something as simple to change as the name.

> but if the idea is to promote a free alternative to Photoshop

For the GIMP team it isn't.

On top of the commitment to free software, the Gimp website says:

"Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done. You can further enhance your productivity with GIMP thanks to many customization options and 3rd party plugins."

Their goal seems to be a good tool, not an alternative to any other software.

And it works well for me! Thanks Gimp.

> Their goal seems to be a good tool, not an alternative to any other software.

Precisely :)

Yes, of course it stands up on its own merits, but in practice what makes it useful to the broader open-source movement is as a tool that fills the same gap that Photoshop does.

It's just like LibreOffice/OpenOffice, of course these tools stand on their own merits too, but again the reason they're important to the open source movement, i.e. what makes them useful in promoting open-source, is that they fill the same gap in the market as Microsoft Office.

Speaking generally, the approach to pushing open-source in practical way is to build open-source tools that cover the key functionality that commercial software offers (as well as functionality that commercial software doesn't yet offer) in order to provide people with less of a reason not to switch.

In other words, Gimp is an "alternative to Photoshop" when framing it as part of the open-source movement (which is what I had implied with my earlier comment). This is not the only framing that can be applied.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com