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

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.