4 ms·
Preach. And it's a disease. Signed, the guy who will forever believe GIMP could have been a contender with a name change decades ago.
by jrm4 4mo ago
Preach. And it's a disease.
Signed, the guy who will forever believe GIMP could have been a contender with a name change decades ago.
- pmontra 4mo agoIn non-English speaking countries gimp is a short word that is so seldom used that nobody knows what it means. I used GIMP for a very long time before running into a story about the meaning of the English world. It was only GNU Image Manipulation Program to me. It still is a contender for image editing programs, for limited photo retouch, for very limited drawing (draw a rectangle outline without googling?) I use LibreOffice Draw for that.
- jrm4 4mo agoI've been up and down this debate a million times, a lot of it here, suffice it to say -- the fact that you and others don't recognize this does not at all detract from my point. To summarize, it's not e.g. about me being personally offended -- it's about people like me (a long time ago) wanting to show people this great software and other reasonable people seeing the name, understanding the meaning, and reasonably thinking "If this software were actually good, why does it have such a ridiculous and often offensive name?" An unserious name -- literally chosen to be an edgy joke -- projects "unserious software."
- ffaccount2 4mo agoNobody in my middle and high school had any idea "gimp" had an English meaning. I assume if anyone knew, we kids would at least occasionally joke about it (we used gimp for various projects). It was long after university after I learned that it's also an English word.
- jrm4 4mo agoI don't know why people keep making this point as if it matters; it sounds like you might be trying to absolve the creators or something. But again, the people who gave the name to the project deliberately chose it because they found its slight offensiveness to be funny. They knew what they were doing and chose to continue to do it anyway.
- Tomte 4mo agoEven worse, I assumed for years that the primary meaning of gimp was bullfinch. See, in German the bird is called a Gimpel. Never bothered to look it up until reltively recently. BTW: Wikipedia is great for translating technical jargon: the language links invariably lead you to the correct disambiguation of a lemma.
- graemep 4mo agoIt did stop it from being used in a multiple markets though. Fine is some places, not in others is not good branding, especially when one of the places its not fine in is the biggest and most influential market.
- Klonoar 4mo agoThe unfortunate truth is that the English speaking market matters for that kind of product and that name is a barrier. It just doesn’t matter that your day to day language or life doesn’t encounter it.
- redsocksfan45 4mo ago[dead]
- joeld42 4mo agoYep. I was an intern at Disney Feature Animation when GIMP first came out. It was really exciting, an alternative to Photoshop (which used to run on linux!) and our in-house painting tools. I pushed for artists to use it, but was told by management to stop mentioning it as "Disney could never use a tool called GIMP". Also that reaction from several artists (who were already tech-savvy, linux using folks in the exact target audience) so it wasn't just "corporate". TBH I think a lot of programmers do this intentionally to protect themselves from their little project ever becoming too mainstream.
- jrm4 4mo agoBRO THANK YOU. This was something I knew to be true in my much more limited circle, but I very much appreciate the real life bigger example.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- burnte 4mo agoJust last night was was thinking about KeePass. Sure, it wounds like Key Pass, or Keep Pass, but it also sounds like Keep Ass, which while cheeky, is less than perfectly commercially enticing. It feels like ExpertsExchange...
- Lammy 4mo agoI'm surprised they didn't just write it out as GNU IMP in the website, documentation, and about boxes. They could just leave the code alone and save themselves the trouble.