Gimp Forked over “Offensive Name” | Hacker News Reader

Gimp Forked over “Offensive Name”

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34 pointsbig_chungus17 comments

They're discussing rewriting code in D or Rust? I wasn't a fan of the rename to begin with cause I thought it was trivial. But rewriting the code in impractical languages cements my skepticism.

I feel like a rewrite of the UI would be very exciting even if it never succeeds, simply because it will be a good large-scale test of D or Rust GUI programming, and hopefully generate some good libraries in the process.

Power to them if they want to try. But I feel like there's more practical and needed work on an important and somewhat unique program like Gimp. Again - skeptical of anyone who calls for a rewrite of a codebase instead of fixing things or building new features.

If you're going to write the frontend, do it in Gambit! That way you're (hopefully?) playing to the strengths of the codebase and potentially opening up loads of customizability.

Then the cynical side says that if they're talking about rewriting but haven't decided the language, they're probably doomed already.

gimp uses [tinyscheme](http://tinyscheme.sourceforge.net/home.html) internally; not sure if gambit would be any easier to integrate with it than D or rust would.

Shoot, I remembered wrong, I thought they used Gambit as their Scheme. Anyway, rewrite the UI in Scheme!

That's the beauty of open source software - you're free to fork and I'm free to continue using GIMP. If GLIMPSE offers better functionality in the future then I'm free to switch.

Glimpse sounds like a great name. If it brings new development into the project it can't hurt. I have no problem with the GIMP name, as a frequent user, but some times things need new names to evolve.

GIMP (GLIMPSE?) had a number of interface and overall "jankiness" problems that, to my knowledge, it's core team never really sought to change. (I would probably have to install it again and play around with it again to have a more concrete idea of the osbtacles I remember). There was an old fork or plugin I think at one time that tried to make the interface more Photoshop-like, but I don't think it was very successful in the long run, not to say that painting apps should perfectly replicate Photoshop's interface - certainly there is room to explore potentially better alternatives. I just don't think GIMP is it.

That being said I think Krita has proven relatively successful in the domain of "open-source painting app". It has its own bits of jankiness here and there but it has grown to include a robust feature set (including some coloring tools which you won't find any analogue to in Photoshop) and has even acquired support for the G'MIC filter suite from GIMP.

As for names, sometimes people just don't know how to swallow their pride. I'm reminded of an incident with a certain Erlang package whose name had unintentionally coincided with a certain racist slur in America. When called out on this, it predictably bubbled into an argument; I think the author doubled-down on keeping the name but later just gave up and changed it to something less offensive. GIMP had the issue of people not wanting to use in the context of school computers and businesses solely because of that name, which I mean, if you refuse to do anything about that, you might have a problem.

"Krita has proven relatively successful in the domain of "open-source painting app""

Ok, but is there a good alternative to GIMP as an open source photo-editing app? Which is automatable? You use the past tense as though everyone already stopped using it.

Feel free to argue otherwise, but I think GIMP's relevance has waned over the years, which is why I speak in that "past tense" you take issue with. For what it's worth I think Krita has worth in the domain of photo manipulation as well.

Krita also has automation utilities:

https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/main_menu/tools_m...

https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/python_scripting/intro...

I'm curious how you use GIMP and whether or not Krita would prove usable for you, i.e. if there's some critical specific functionality GIMP excels at where Krita falls behind.

I never heard of Krita before this, but my background is of being a very casual user of Photoshop which was pretty unaffordable in the 90s (other people's licenses, plus there was a "lite" version included with a scanner once) and when I first learned of GIMP, it was extremely annoying how much it tried to imitate Photoshop yet be arbitrarily different, but eventually I learned to do basic stuff in it. So now typically, I just want to resize a picture, convert the format, change the gamma, do something simple with layers, etc, and don't want to pay or learn anything new.

However, I never did learn how to script GIMP, and it seems like I will need to soon for maintaining a website, and if as I recall it has some sort of lisp like thing, I'm kind of allergic to that. I don't know python either, but it's probably more my speed.

Borderware firewall (from back in the 90's and Y2K) was originally called Janus (after the Roman god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings.) which seemed apropos at the time. But their first big customers were in Sweden, where they kept pronouncing it like "anus." Realizing they'd have this problem all over Europe and most of South America, they changed the name.

That's a founding story that never made it to their website ABOUT page.

Named partially after the movie Pulp Fiction and Ving Rhames's scene. "General Image Manipulation Program" was kind of fit onto it. Not quite a backcronym, but definitely thought of at the same time.

Sounds like a Scunthorpe problem.

appropriating open source bit a bit...

Finally! They should have renamed a decade ago.

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