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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Will continue to say it, this piece of software that could be a mainstream huge deal, a straight-up Adobe killer, will never do this unless it changes its name.

I've mostly given up hope on this, but it's still wild that people who work on the software just seem to very stubbornly not understand this.

Whether you want to blame it on ableism, or perhaps simply "you should name your software after something/someone skilled or professional, not literally the opposite," you're preventing people like me (IT teaching, a go-between between techies and non-techies) from being able to recommend it.

Luckily, Krita's here and for better or worse does the AI stuff.

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That's probably true. But offending people with prudish attitudes or without a sense of humor is a pretty common old-school hacker goal.

It serves a valuable community function by protecting the community from corporate interests, non-technical bike-shedding, and overload by "bug" reports that are actually just the user not being technical enough to use the tool properly.

Edit: Also FWIW, I've had no problem introducing GIMP to church groups and in various professional settings.

Double edit: since you mention schools, I should also add that I taught my wife GIMP and she had no problem sharing it in her school (US public high school).

> But offending people with prudish attitudes or without a sense of humor…

Some folks who are neither prudish or humorless want to see the project and its contributors succeed to the degree that alternatives like Photopea has, or as Blender has in the 3D space. The project will continue to limp along until the name is changed to something without negative connotations in English-speaking populations.

You can fork it, rename to something like "Glimpse" and see the adoption skyrocket. Surely the success is just around the corner. Oh wait a minute

Hey don't be unfair to them, they also tried to collect donations for changing the name.

Point taken — the name is just one of many issues between GIMP and Blender-like success. But there are also open source projects like Inkscape, which enjoyed success in part because of a rechristening that eliminated the headwinds of previous bad names.

> offending people with prudish attitudes or without a sense of humor is a pretty common old-school hacker goal

I agree, and to an extent laud it, but it also means keeping GIMP an old-school hacker project.

> his piece of software (...) will never do this unless it changes its name.

Why?

Honestly, why?

As a non-native English speaker (like the vast majority of people in this planet), the word "gimp" to me means "the free software image processing program". If I search google, duckduckgo, bing, whatever, the entire first page of results refers to that very program. Digging deeper, I start to find some references to the Pulp Fiction movie, where a minor character is named like that. I remember that character, but in my language it was called by a different name. Is that all?

Is there any other meaning to this word? If so, it must be so obscure as to be completely irrelevant.

Please, take into account that most English speakers are not native speakers, and many words will have a different meaning to us. English as a lingua franca may be comfortable to native speakers, but it also means that it's no longer yours.

The name of the program does not seem to be a serious issue for its adoption. Now, if you want to talk about its user interface... I don't think it does, either (but I may be open to discussion). I have taught my kids to do simple image processing tasks in gimp: copy-pasting parts of an image into another, removing some stuff, blurring, simple layer operations, etc. Anyhow, they got it in a few minutes. Important to say: they are not at all tech-savvy (to my dismay! but this is another story). If they use adobe or krita they will surely find it slightly confusing at the beginning, but no big deal either. Just like a regular person moving from photoshop to gimp.

  > Is there any other meaning to this word?

Yes. You can often learn obscure meanings by prepending a word in your search query with "urban dictionary".

A gimp is a man dressed in a bondage suit used for BDSM sexual roleplay. Gimps are considered inappropriate to even talk about in school and business settings. The GIMP software might as well have the name of a curse word like fuck or shit as far as its appropriateness in public discourse goes.

yeah well.. says more about those who even bring that up... most people probably dont know that

Anyone who's seen "Pulp Fiction", or hasnt been under a rock, or older than a young teen would have encountered the term or concept

I don't think more than half of the world population have been under a rock.

Anyone whose native language is english who's seen "Pulp Fiction", or hasnt been under a rock, or older than a young teen would have encountered the term or concept

As a french, the first and only thing that comes to mind when I hear the word "gimp" is the software, not the kink. It was shared a few weeks ago in my company chat because someone wanted to do a photo edit and absolutely no one even made any semblance of joke related to it

Thanks for the clarification (as well as the suggestion of looking at the urban dictionary, in the other comment).

My point is that when you say:

> Gimps are considered inappropriate to even talk about in school and business settings

This refers solely to the tiny percent of the world where people are native english speakers. Elsewhere, it already means the image processing software, if anything at all.

Literally, get over it. Even my (extremely conservative) church group doesn't have an issue with it. 1) because most people don't know BDSM terminology and 2) gimp has other connotations so it's not even obvious that was intended and 3) most people aren't terminally online and 100% don't care as long as the program works.

I've never had a problem sharing it. And no one outside tech has ever brought up BDSM when I tell them about the program or help them install it.

Eh. Where I work they probably wouldn't care about the BDSM aspects but they are pretty sensitive to ableist slurs, which is primarily why I recommend Photopea instead of GIMP when they need to do Photoshop-ish things.

The cool thing about life is that, we don't have to get over it. Instead we can advocate for change. And there's literally nothing you can do about it lol.

Fork it then.

Another cool thing about open source is that I can do that while still trying to affect change in the core repo :D

There's really no "shut up and go away" that you can give me that will work, because you aren't some grand FOSS arbiter, you're just some rando on the internet like me.

Sigh. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

An extremely conservative church group is perhaps the worst place to try to figure this out; y'all will self-censor naturally.

Anyway, I teach IT, in a department -- shared with Communications -- and can absolutely assure you that this name is a no-go. I get that people don't like "politics" and "optics" and such, but that's what's happening here.

This is something that non-english speakers have long learned to live with. It is due time that everybody accepts that some words will sound funny to them. In french, for example, "bit" means "penis". This creates quite a stir when you teach computer science to kids. Yet nobody says that computer science is a no-go!

I didn't say no-one gets upset by the name. I said that they're being silly gooses.

If your department wouldn't use free software because of the name, that's very much a them problem. And it's sad that they're so sensitive.

If you don't like the name, you don't have to use the software. Or fork it can call it something more anodyne to your sensibilities.

But no. You want everyone to cater to sensitive people. And thus, myself and others are here to say your comment is annoying when this comes up every thread that GIMP is mentioned.

Or many, many other things (https://www.wordnik.com/words/gimp).

It's both a pejorative term for disabled people, and a specific type of bondage fetish.

I'd argue that GIMP reclaimed the word for a better meaning. Consider how the word lame has lost its derogatory impact. Googling "gimp" gives me only results about the program. Changing the name now would dilute decades of brand recognition and confuse users, especially those in non-English communities.

I think the sunk cost into branding is the right take here; my 2¢. Gimp is still niche, and will never be used the same way people say Photoshop when referring to any general photo editing. It will take quite a few more years of transient language and lots of success for that unrealistic outcome.

I think they should just rename it as IMP. The gnu is implied. Richard Stallman might complain it should always be called Gnu IMP (New Imp), which is fine.

I just treat it as an acronym, as do the current developers.

The original founders of the project aren't the ones at the helm currently and the GNU Image Manipulation Program acronym took over from whatever pun it was a long time ago already.

You might like krita better but maybe it is an insult or genital part name in someone else language but you might never know. It happens to so many products. The Toyota MR2 really sound in french like you are calling someone an asshole which is the reason they called it simply MR in that particular market, while an audi etron sounded like audi feces. All this to say that naming is hard and you can never please everyone.

People should really relax and not take personally what has been an acronym for most of the project's life.

There was an effort to rename it to Glimpse, with non-zero community and developer support, also solving a few common complaints about the user interface. It ultimately resulted in a dead fork, disproving not one but two hypotheses.

It's certainly not all that much of an Adobe killer in places where English isn't a first language. And where English is only a second language, the software is the first thing that comes to mind, by far. "Those letters also have a different use in English" comes at a distant second. To second language English speakers (and perhaps even to first language speakers in some regions, but that's pure speculation on my side), that knowledge is more like odd trivia about the software than a hindrance to adaption.

Doesn't seem to have caused a problem for Git. Probably didn't for LAME, either, granted MP3 seems to be falling by the wayside now.

> you're preventing people like me (IT teaching, a go-between between techies and non-techies) from being able to recommend it.

Why exactly is it bad? It's not that all software have to be loved and recommended by everyone, opinions differ and it's normal.

If for you the name matters more than the substance then well maybe you're not the target audience, so be it.

Because I believe in the higher goal of free and open source software, which is more or less the same as the belief that knowledge should be shared -- and the space that GIMP occupies is one that I think a great deal of people would (have benefitted from) if it were to be disrupted from Adobe.

No, I don't believe in hiding good software that can help a lot of people under a secret rock.

It's not about the name it's about pace of development. It's extremely slow since they don't see a need for more backing like let's say Blender.

I'm sure any project with a stupid name cannot survive. Take, for example, git. The name is a literal insult. github? Come on, like "a place where gits meet"? This is ridiculous! How would you expect anyone who is not a git to teach about it? Use it in a serious enterprise setting?

...Ah no, wait a moment...

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