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Comment by blauditore | Hacker News Reader

Do you mean Gimp? I don't think that's so relevant. Did Git suffer from the same problem?

I guess both are meant to be a kind of joke, calling your software a bad name in jest. But I think the joke works much better in the case of "git". Depending on what you read into it, calling someone a "gimp" is really quite offensive.

git: A silly, incompetent, stupid or annoying person (usually a man).

gimp: A person who is lame due to a crippling of the legs or feet.

GIMP was so named without an awareness that it coincided with pejorative. It wasn't an intentional joke.

Sure, but let me be clear, I don't think that matters at all.

Again, I'm pretty sure the reason I always get downvoted to hell on this one is because people think I'm being "the thought police" or something. And I suppose it's kind of like that but not really?

Yes, personally, I do argue slightly against the name, but honestly, I lose no sleep on it on a personal level.

What bothers me the most is that GIMP feels like a huge missed opportunity. As in -- let's say for sake of argument that the creators are strongly attached to the name, I don't know, even if it was named after Richard S. Gimp and you wanted to honor him, so you have a theoretically "bulletproof" reason.

On balance, it still AINT WORTH IT. You guys had a SERIOUS shot of eating Adobe's lunch and strongly spreading a much better way to do picture editing, but you screwed it up by staying inside your own bubble. The name was just NOT WORTH KEEPING.

Does GIMP have a bigger market share in non-English speaking places? Because if it does, then maybe the name is to be blamed. But if usage is similar everywhere, the name does not seem to matter much, or at all, for the (lack of) success.

I don't think this is a useful metric; the problem with how tech scales is that multiplicative effects are hard to measure.

But as someone who works in IT between tech folk and regular folk, I immediately percieve that a great number of liminal regular folk are going to 100% nope out of a terrible name like this. Might as well call it Poopy Edit or something like that.

So when people do not understand the meaning of a word and not care about it, because they do not speak that language, the metric is useless instead of a test of "everything else but the name".

My, small but non zero, experience says the reason these speakers of other language declined to use it was because it lacked features and sometimes because "piracy is also free". They pointed the brush system was basic, PS already had effects they used a lot. No adjustment layers, styles or layer groups to be more efficient. Slow processing because it operated in full data always, while PS solved preview first and the rest in background. And many other things. The Mac ones found no issues with the windowing system (no MDI mode then, with everything wrapped by big window), because it matched more what they were used to, but Windows users found it bad because their OS is not designed for it. None cared about what Gimp or Wilber words are, it was "a poor PS clone with a croissant dog mascot".

The acronym was coined first, with the letter G being added to -IMP as a reference to "the gimp" in the scene from the 1994 Pulp Fiction film.[8]

- Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP#History

The movie in question doesn't even make the pejorative version of the word clear. The best you could come out of it is some weird fetish thing.

I am an artist who is quite happy for part of her living to be "drawing porn" and I find "The GIMP", considered solely as a word for "a weird fetish thing", to be a singularly tacky name.

The Web is an imperfect corpus, but "git" is less commonly used as an insult. Even once you git rid of all the software references with "git -software -version -torvalds -branch -commit -github -repo -repository" your primary definitions are as a synonym for "get," e.g., the top result is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git!

Compare to "gimp -image -org" where the top result is not only an insult, but an ableist one that would instantly land you a trip to HR.

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