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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised it got that epithet, I'm used to "upset by weird sex stuff" as being a US-right position, and "woke" being a term that's used by US-right to denigrate US-left.

Then again, I'm also old enough to have seen it shift significantly in meaning at least once, and I think I'm seeing it shift meaning again.

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Before the weird sex stuff, "gimp" was an insulting term for a crippled person. The fact that it's so long out of common use for that purpose that a lot of folks don't realize that is perhaps an argument for not taking it too seriously. On the other hand, disabled folks are certainly among the most oppressed and abused and in ways that aren't well-understood by most folks, so a decent person should be pretty careful about using language that could be demeaning. I dunno. It feels like an archaic term that ought not have any power today, but what do I know?

Personally I just prefer to avoid the debate and call it “GNU IMP” v(._. )v

Maybe this is the way forward? :)

It could be that easy

That's probably the best solution.

I think they could also get away with "gImp"

Or even, take after GIF and pronounce it with a "J" sound, like "JIMP"

i just realized that since the g in gimp stands for gnu, and the g in gnu should be silent, "imp" might work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imp

the g in gif stands for graphics, so i could not accept jif as pronunciation and the creators chose it deliberately to match the jif peanutbutter brand, not because there was any logic to it. jimp does not match anything, except chimp maybe.

In the UK, it’s the sex one and would be used as a general “idiot” word but that seemed to have mostly faded away. It’s not a word I’ve seen used in that context for many years.

Not refuting anything here, just adding some context from over here. Whichever way you slice it, it’s always been an awful name.

Yeah, it's always felt like an "edgy" name a teenager or quite young man would come up with. Which makes sense, the original GIMP authors were college-aged boys when they created it.

I'd like it if they changed the name. We're (the Open Source community) not teenagers or annoying college kids anymore, by and large.

The issue is that there are a bunch of people like this[0] who get incredibly upset and politicize any attempts to be "the adult in the room" and ask for renaming of unsavory names.

The funniest of these is when Europeans talk about how they are being "forced" to comply with American cultural norms and you go through their account and they are so deeply steeped in American culture due to their participation in the anglophone internet spaces which are dominated by them. People in Europe will argue with you that you are importing woke culture if you suggest that they shouldn't say the N word, but are seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that the reason they find the word exciting to say and they say it in English is an import of American culture

[0]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49327771

I like it that the scruffy teenager hacker mentality is preserved in the name. It was also a bit of self deprecating humour at the time, because using Gimp instead of Photoshop did make you feel crippled a bit.

I hope they never give in to the corporate-lawyer induced bland-washing .

I'm not a corporate lawyer.

I'm just a Free Software user and developer and I think it's nicer when I can recommend something to someone without having to think about whether I might be saying something rude or hurtful. I assume there was a stink about the name because it bothers some disabled folks. It's not my place to tell them not to be bothered, I'd rather just not do the shitty thing that bothers them.

It seems cringey and childish to insist on doing a thing that makes a bunch of people feel unwelcome based on something about themselves they can't change. And, for what? So you can feel like a scruffy teenaged hacker?

I like my Free Software community to welcome people of all sorts.

Having a "stink" is right. Even without much thought, it's off-putting, does not sound professional and really icky. When you think a bit harder, it's just kinda awful. I do actually suspect the name does have some measurable impact on adoption. Most people don't want to say "I gave up photoshop, I use gimp." outside of hardcore linux circles and since then, it has gone from the only open source gig in town to just one of many alternatives.

Anecdote time, back when gimp was still version 0.8 or somesuch , my wheelchair-bound college professor more or less forced gimp on us students because (his words) " You can tell by the name it's software for people like me." He was joking of course, he was just a huge open source proponent.

But still, I have the feeling there are way more people thinking people will feel unwelcome than actual people feeling unwelcome. Though people's sensibilities do seem to shift a bit and maybe I'm just becoming an old fart.

Really? In Northern Ireland in the 80s/90s it was always used in the same way as spaz / flid etc - ie. an ableist slur. Kids would typically scream it when someone did something clumsy or uncoordinated. Lovely, eh?

I don't think I've actually heard the sex thing being used anywhere in the UK, except perhaps when discussing Pulp Fiction. Even in kink contexts!

A lot of kink participants are sensitive to oppressive language and try not to use it (outside of a consensual scene that includes it, perhaps). Consent culture is necessarily a culture that doesn't use slurs in daily public life, and at least some who participate in kink are particularly careful about consent.

Odd! Yeah nah, wasn’t really a thing in England.

> Before the weird sex stuff, "gimp" was an insulting term for a crippled person. The fact that it's so long out of common use for that purpose that a lot of folks don't realize that is perhaps an argument for not taking it too seriously

It's a US specific slur when used in this context, not in other English speaking countries (let alone non-English countries) A lot of GIMP developers are European yet the Glimpse project tried to force American cultural/linguistic rules on a non-American project.

Words mean different things in different regions and languages, just because it's offensive in your language does not mean it's offensive in others.

They didn't try to force anybody to do anything. They forked a Free Software project as allowed by the license. You seem awfully sensitive.

I remember the (now deleted) Gitlab issue on the GIMP project that called on for the name to change, it certainly wasn't friendly.

What do you believe the word "force" means?

It's a decorative strip of fabric used to trim upholstery and hide tacks to me.

Somehow, I doubt you're an upholsterer.

I honestly didn't put that much thought into it. I assumed it's woke as it opposed the sexual name, from my short Google fo this was the main reason for the fork.

I am not American either so I had no idea about the "old meaning" and even less do I care about sexual stuff in my software naming schemes.

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