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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Preach. And it's a disease.

Signed, the guy who will forever believe GIMP could have been a contender with a name change decades ago.

Yep. I was an intern at Disney Feature Animation when GIMP first came out. It was really exciting, an alternative to Photoshop (which used to run on linux!) and our in-house painting tools. I pushed for artists to use it, but was told by management to stop mentioning it as "Disney could never use a tool called GIMP". Also that reaction from several artists (who were already tech-savvy, linux using folks in the exact target audience) so it wasn't just "corporate". TBH I think a lot of programmers do this intentionally to protect themselves from their little project ever becoming too mainstream.

BRO THANK YOU.

This was something I knew to be true in my much more limited circle, but I very much appreciate the real life bigger example.

Just last night was was thinking about KeePass. Sure, it wounds like Key Pass, or Keep Pass, but it also sounds like Keep Ass, which while cheeky, is less than perfectly commercially enticing. It feels like ExpertsExchange...

In non-English speaking countries gimp is a short word that is so seldom used that nobody knows what it means. I used GIMP for a very long time before running into a story about the meaning of the English world. It was only GNU Image Manipulation Program to me.

It still is a contender for image editing programs, for limited photo retouch, for very limited drawing (draw a rectangle outline without googling?) I use LibreOffice Draw for that.

I've been up and down this debate a million times, a lot of it here, suffice it to say -- the fact that you and others don't recognize this does not at all detract from my point.

To summarize, it's not e.g. about me being personally offended -- it's about people like me (a long time ago) wanting to show people this great software and other reasonable people seeing the name, understanding the meaning, and reasonably thinking "If this software were actually good, why does it have such a ridiculous and often offensive name?"

An unserious name -- literally chosen to be an edgy joke -- projects "unserious software."

Nobody in my middle and high school had any idea "gimp" had an English meaning. I assume if anyone knew, we kids would at least occasionally joke about it (we used gimp for various projects).

It was long after university after I learned that it's also an English word.

I don't know why people keep making this point as if it matters; it sounds like you might be trying to absolve the creators or something.

But again, the people who gave the name to the project deliberately chose it because they found its slight offensiveness to be funny.

They knew what they were doing and chose to continue to do it anyway.

Even worse, I assumed for years that the primary meaning of gimp was bullfinch. See, in German the bird is called a Gimpel. Never bothered to look it up until reltively recently.

BTW: Wikipedia is great for translating technical jargon: the language links invariably lead you to the correct disambiguation of a lemma.

It did stop it from being used in a multiple markets though. Fine is some places, not in others is not good branding, especially when one of the places its not fine in is the biggest and most influential market.

The unfortunate truth is that the English speaking market matters for that kind of product and that name is a barrier. It just doesn’t matter that your day to day language or life doesn’t encounter it.

I'm surprised they didn't just write it out as GNU IMP in the website, documentation, and about boxes. They could just leave the code alone and save themselves the trouble.

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