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Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to revel in the fork's demise for any reason besides relief that it didn't end up splitting GIMP's contributors and community in a way that would have harmed both projects.

> we could not find contributors willing to step up and help with non-code tasks like moderating communication channels

Gotta say though it feels ironic that they couldn't find enough people to be comment janitors considering the whole thing was based on wanting people to stop saying a particular word.

> As a result, we struggled to scale the project to match increasing demand.

‘Glimpse didn't fail; it was actually too popular’?

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That's the thing, they didn't take any GIMP contributors.

Everyone that was behind Glimpse was third party to the GIMP project.

This wasn't even a serious project but an example of malicious virtue signaling with a long-term plan for sort of hostile takeover. People involved just took the original code and replaced every GIMP occurrence with Glimpse, added new logo/icon and called job done. Then went to the news sites trying to raise awareness of the supposed name controversy hoping noise will discredit GIMP while they'll portrait themselves as the saviors. Because who'd want to contribute to a software that has such bad reputation.

It's been over 24 years for me since I've used GIMP for the first time and the only problem that I had was always with GUI ergonomics. You had to understand everything anew after being more accustomed to proprietary software pieces. My friend never adapted to anything else but Photoshop - even Krita is beyond her abilities.

Nearly every discussion regarding GIMP on hn will include thread about the name 'problem' and this is getting tiresome. The name won't change and those who feel offended should focus on problems whose solution is genuinely productive.

> This wasn't even a serious project but an example of malicious virtue signaling with a long-term plan for sort of hostile takeover. People involved just took the original code and replaced every GIMP occurrence with Glimpse

I recall one of the reasons given on the GIMP Gitlab issue to change the name was "it will encourage more contributors" that apparently don't contribute because of the project name. Glimpse certainly had a lot of contributors... not.

I can't think of a single project that changed a name to satisfy these people ever received more contributors as a result.

I feel like it would have though if Glimpse had managed to become the default image editor on at least one major distro, just by virtue of people stumbling in to contributing some fix or addition to ‘the thing that came with my OS’ without necessarily being aware of the history.

Like the FFmpeg/libav fork that eventually got back together. Or Compiz/Beryl, or Emacs/XEmacs, or GCC/EGCS, or whatever :)

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