OT, but something I've been wondering for a while:
Why, WHY is it called "The GIMP"? I mean, I understand the acronym. I understand that nerds in general (such as myself) are the kind of folks who look past names and appearances and judge just about everything on its content.
But whenever I attempt even explain the benefit of linux to a layperson, inevitably the user's need to "run apps like Photoshop" will come up. And inevitably, I'll tell them that there's a similar program that's entirely free, which they become excited about. Then I tell them the name and they immediately make quite a number of assumptions.
The name sounds amateurish and unstable. It sounds like some Windows freeware that installs a toolbar or two, not a powerful image editor or a real alternative to something called Photoshop.
And don't get me wrong, I think the software itself is great and I use it constantly! But for software, just like any product, image and impression are quite important.
The GIMP started off as a college project, and I'm guessing that the name was a product of youthful cleverness combined with no expectations that it would ever become a widely-used open source project.
As far as why it's still named that nearly 20 years later, there are lots of decent potential reasons and a couple bad ones. Branding and a loss of mindshare is a concern, as anyone who watched the early days of Firefox (or Phoenix, or Firebird, or...) could tell you. It's also a fair bit of work if you want to actually change the name everywhere and not have all the code break spectacularly. Naturally, there's also the chance that the maintainers just don't care. It's easy to write off people who are offended or express dislike for the name as the overly-sensitive political correctness police, and I've seen many people (although none in an official position afaik) do so in previous discussions like this.
> Naturally, there's also the chance that the maintainers just don't care. It's easy to write off people who are offended or express dislike for the name as the overly-sensitive political correctness police, and I've seen many people (although none in an official position afaik) do so in previous discussions like this.
I've had a close call of being banned from an IRC channel after mentioning the Brain Fuck Scheduler (a different task scheduler for linux), when there was a 'family friendly' policy with no swearing. I assumed that the no swearing part of that rule was more contextual, but it turned out to be a zero tolerance policy.
This is a frequent problem in open software projects. There are countless applications out there where the name has absolutely nothing to do with the functionality of the program (or it does, but only if you understand some geeky reference).
Not to mention that these names have a habit of changing often too when being forked etc.
Why, WHY is it called "The GIMP"? I mean, I understand the acronym. I understand that nerds in general (such as myself) are the kind of folks who look past names and appearances and judge just about everything on its content.
But whenever I attempt even explain the benefit of linux to a layperson, inevitably the user's need to "run apps like Photoshop" will come up. And inevitably, I'll tell them that there's a similar program that's entirely free, which they become excited about. Then I tell them the name and they immediately make quite a number of assumptions.
The name sounds amateurish and unstable. It sounds like some Windows freeware that installs a toolbar or two, not a powerful image editor or a real alternative to something called Photoshop.
And don't get me wrong, I think the software itself is great and I use it constantly! But for software, just like any product, image and impression are quite important.