Every time I see something about it I'm usually compelled to make note of what a poor idea it has been to keep this name. There's a whole lot of proverbial water under that bridge, but I definitely think the choice to keep it has always been childish, ridiculous, and perhaps literally the greatest barrier that has kept it from being a much more serious competitor to Adobe stuff.
> I definitely think the choice to keep it has always been childish, ridiculous, and perhaps literally the greatest barrier that has kept it from being a much more serious competitor to Adobe stuff.
I seriously doubt that. There's a project called Glimpse which is (afaik) just a rebranding of GIMP to be more acceptable. It was popular for a brief 15 minutes, then was forgotten.
I based that off a HN comment I read in the past, but looking into it now, that doesn't seem too far off base. The changes mentioned in the release notes[1] are all about rebranding - replacing on-screen text, logos, docs, etc. There are a couple non-branding-related changes like changes to keyboards shortcuts, but it seems fair to call it more of a rebrand than a fork. It does help me appreciate how much work goes into just this "surface-level" stuff of cross-platform public use Open Source software.
Fair, I'd still maintain too little too late. "Glimpse" didn't happen until much later.
A point I made above; I think people are really WAY too inside their own silos. I work at a university, I've also done non-profit work with children who are LEARNING this stuff. And now, what does it look like, me like "Hey kids, try GIMP?"
I'm only seeing this now (so not sure if you'll read this), but:
The thing is, vast swathes of the world doesn't know what that word means. I didn't know it until I learned about this controversy. If the name had been the "greatest barrier" to its acceptance, GIMP would have been taken up in a LOT of the poorer countries, both because it's free and almost no one knows the word well enough to see it as offensive. Maybe the name played a role in some small way in US academic institutions or something similar to that. But without more fundamental issues (usability issues, stability problems in the past, UI latency, a thousand other little papercuts), the name itself would not have been a great barrier for GIMP.
I worked in a webdev shop where we relied heavily on graphical tools like ps and gimp. Never once have I heard anyone take issue with the name, at least not when I was there, so the name hasn't kept gimp from being a competitor to Adobe stuff in that company at least.
I have to ask: are there really that many companies out there that base their tooling decisions on tool naming? I imagine they wont use git or bash either lol.
The rest of the creative world, people learning, people who might use these tools later; students and children. I work in a university. Etc. All of those people know "photoshop" as a verb.
And now I'm here saying -- "Try this thing, it's called...GIMP?"
I think some people here are as wildly out of touch as the people they disagree with. Most people don't care about this and will use the tool that does the job, regardless of what it is named.
Nope. It's not that individuals are offended or whatnot. It's that a ton of people will literally never be able to use this tool because they've never heard of it.
They will not have heard of it because many of the kinds of people who might be able to introduce them to it will not take it seriously because it is a fundamentally unserious name.
Do make sure to disconnect from internet first. I didn't and the new name somehow leaked out and backformed into a fully-fledged, actively maintained FOSS project. (It even works quite well, although it was a pain changing out every single gimp path for a krita path, by hand, plus of course pasting in the krita binary/ascii data.)
Again, I'm not talking about "being personally offended" or something like that, more the second order effects. Most everything you've named isn't something that meaningfully could be a big winner for free/open source, and also, none of those names are "as offensive" (again, I don't make the rules, and I don't personally care much either way. Here, I care about getting good software in the hands of mroe people)
GIMP is a unique missed opportunity because zillions of people, way more than those who are "in tech," understand the concept of "Photoshop." I honestly believe the entire landscape of "photo-editing" could have been much better and open if this name was something less, well, publicly stupid.
There is no way to me that the value of "keeping the name" is remotely close to the lost value of "way more people being able to use great and open software" here.
