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Comment by dwiize | Hacker News Reader

Finally time for a new name?

Between it's derogatory and sexual definitions, I can't realistically use an app called "GIMP" at work even if I was personally comfortable with it. If you're in a similar position, try Glimpse.

https://glimpse-editor.github.io/

> I can't realistically use an app called "GIMP" at work even if I was personally comfortable with it.

What kind of work do you do?

I'm not parent but probably they work in a corporate environment where you have to talk to someone about what apps you're going to have installed on your machine and get them approved. Based on my experience it's quite common at companies over a few hundreds employees. If the company is publicly traded, then you're almost guaranteed having to go through that because of regulatory concerns (I'm in Australia, it may vary by country)

Say it is the GNU image manipulation app.

this sounds so stallman

I'd find it very weird if there was some platform team member responsible for app installations who's not familiar with GIMP.

I work at a technology company that knows what apps people run on their computers, but even if I didn't I would no more use an app called "GIMP" than I would one called "FAG". The name is pretty offensive IMHO.

This argument is ridiculous.

In my language, PIXAR means literally "to pee". This leads to inevitably to a couple of jokes when you start talking about this company, and then it stops forever. I'd still be happy to work for this company regardless of its name.

There's thousands of languages in this world. Any word or acronym that you come bay will be likely "offensive" in several of them. It does not really matter. Most people in the world are not native english speakers and "Gimp" means nothing to them.

all the ball bearings in my car have FAG written on them. My car runs on FAGs. Get over it...

To me this kind of discussion always sounds like americans are all a bunch of school teachers trying to prevent their bunch of 10year-olds from giggling. Which, when applied to adults, is a very childish thing to do...

> > I can't realistically use an app called "GIMP" at work even if I was personally comfortable with it.

> What kind of work do you do?

I would assume that the parent poster works with a bunch of high schoollers and other folks that can't understand the concept of a word having several meanings -- specially when acronyms are involved.

Meh. Try living in Norway and explaining to your boss about how you had a bug in your poo (bash).

(Ambiguity grows exponentially the number of languages you switch between, meaning the possibility for innuendo does too =P)

Hahaha this is so funny!

- What are you writing?

- I'm writing a poo script

- have you tried laxatives?

Call it the GNU Image Manipulation Program then.

What kind of place is this where they care about the name of applications you use? You should stop using git before they find out.

You can tell them the Microsoft version renamed master to main and chuckle to yourself for keeping a straight face

It would have been a perfect opportunity to rename the project, but until then, in case anyone reading this isn't aware, there's prior work for a fork under a new name, as Glimpse -- https://glimpse-editor.github.io/

I can attest that Glimpse works as expected, and you don't have to wince when a client asks what tools you used.

A "Debian Iceweasel" style rebranding seems like the easier option.

There's already a fork for that, and it doesn't appear to have much mindshare.

Finally time to stop this ridiculous trend to rename everything one does not like ?

Names can mean multiple things to different groups and if one had to cater to every group which finds a name non fitting then you'd end up spending more time on name changes than actual development as in some context any name can be seen as offensive. This isn't strictly useful and to non-native english speakers the connection between the offensive meaning and the name would most likely never occur as it's use in such is obscure (for one, this is where I first learned of it).

Currently there's a large number of resources that refer to the program as GIMP which are unlikely to be updated if the name changed and thus making years worth of guides, tutorials, and so on harder to find unless you know to search for (which if you do... the name change is meaningless as you'll still see GIMP). Harassing GIMP over the name is hardly a way to get things moving forwards and only sparks a negative environment. Should you find the name to make the software unusable then it would be better to focus your attention on the fork which changes the name rather than continuing to contribute a negative to the positive news of GIMP turning 25.

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