- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
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No, it was named after the character, GIMP is a reverse acronym:
It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing out name ideas. It only took a few more minutes to determine what the ‘G’ stood for.
Honestly IMP would have been dope
TIL
It only took a few more minutes to determine what the ‘G’ stood for.
Gag
Honestly, this is such a dumb argument. The creators of The GIMP acknowledge that this is a reference to a BDSM kink popularized by Pulp Fiction. Leather bondage masks are probably the first thing most people think of when they hear the word “Gimp”.
Yes, it is also a relatively obscure ableist term for someone with a visible physical disability, but this was never what the creators had in mind with the name. Pretty much nobody uses this term anymore.
Just let it be. If you oppose it for being ableist you’re just pretending that the name is a reference to something offensive, when it’s a well understood fact that it wasn’t named after the ableist term. If you oppose it for what the creators named it after, you’re basically just kink shaming, and I really don’t care if the program is a reference to bondage sex.
Surprisingly people don’t constantly rally against LAME, the MP3 media encoder, and liblame is a massively important library for audio processing used by just about every computer in existence. This was deliberately named after the ableist term, and the ‘L’ in “LAME” stands for “LAME”, so they could have used literal any -AME name they wanted, and kept their stupid recursive abbreviation + ironic project name that was so popular at the time (LAME stands for “LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder”).
People are too sensitive today.
Always have been, nowadays it’s just easier to hear other people’s opinions
I liked the part where he said that a hard fork was not a solution…and then talks favorably about the name change of OpenOffice to LibreOffice with a fork.
If the developers won’t bend to the will of the users, you can’t force them. Do what we’ve always done in that situation: make a fork. I’m sure if it’s that important to so many people, it can be done.
In my opinion it is its limited suitability for (my) common image editing needs. I.e. add a white text with black border to an image.
But these are my requirements. The developers don’t have to cater to them if they don’t want to. I in turn can decide to not use the program or add the features I would like to see myself (It’s the former for me).
That is the way it is.
Edit: The name gimp was never an issue for me. There are far worse.
I dislike using a slur for disabled people as the name but it’s only partially why I stopped using it. Bad cross-platform support, sticking to ancient GTK versions, GNOME-fication of the upcoming 3.0 version, etc. also pushed me away.
I stopped using it because of the dev’s attitude towards people wanting them to change the name. I switched to Krita
I stopped using Krita cause it shows a barely SFW upskirt anime picture every time it starts up.
That’s way more of an issue than a programs name.There’s no way that’s even remotely an upskirt. WTF
Still, it’s not something I’m comfortable with when my boss is standing behind me.
If you feel uncomfortable with your boss looking at that, you’re either not doing the thing you are being paid for or your boss does not know what your work is about.
I haven’t even noticed that, it takes a while to open so I do other stuff while it does its thing
I’m curious whether there’s anyone in this thread who is cool with, for instance, Github renaming the default branch name to “main” but thinks GIMP renaming would be woke BS.
For the record, I’m for both changes and and yes I do have a glass case where I keep my downvote collection.
Then don’t use it.
Or fork it and remove all instances of the word. Put the pearls down, you’re grinding them to dust.
this is just stupid. like oh my god how dare they to use name thst is also tied to bdsm. it might just be me but I have never thought about the wrong gimp then talking about gnu image manipulation program. also it’s an acronym that works
Those points are addressed in the article. It’s not an issue for a lot of people, but it’s still an issue.
Everything is an issue if you try hard enough. Feel free to fork and rename if you’re not happy. You seem to have a lot of time to waste.
My IQ continually dropped while reading this summary and anyone that knows me would tell you that I can’t afford that.
Agreed, it’s such a poor summary of the article that I can’t tell if it’s an intentional strawman argument.
I think the
it’s sometimes said as a derogatory word for people with physical or mental disabilities
part is the problematic one, not the BDSM connotations. imagine if it was named Functional Advanced Graphics Generating Opensource Tool in the 90s and they refused to change the name because “it was different times back then oh and we don’t want to sterilise language”.
While I understand the author’s frustration with the developers not giving as much weight to the (non-contributing) community, the fact is that the developers get to make the final call on this, and they get to use whatever criteria they like.
And there’s no definitive answer to whether a name change would be a net positive or negative–a handful of complaints vs brand dilution is a subjective call. And for the number of users, I get the impression that it’s not as big of a deal to most people as it is to the author.
Right, ultimately it’s their project and they can do what they want, but it’s also their loss every time some person or organization skips it because of the name.
But how many people skip it due to the name? What are the actual numbers?
There aren’t actual numbers because you can’t poll for that. There’s not a database somewhere that keeps track of every teacher or manager that says “ew” when someone brings up GIMP. There are some documented examples, though, some of which are listed in the article.
You can survey users of photo editing software and ask something like:
- have you heard of GIMP?
- have you used GIMP?
- if not, why? name, features, ux, etc
I agree with this, but in open source there’s an extra layer of complexity: the “I don’t care about market share” dev attitude that’s sometimes admirable and sometimes frustrating.
Honestly it just doesn’t sound like a legit app to me. Sounds like some guy’s personal project.
Calling your cool new app “TARD,” for example — and then insisting (with a straight face) that it is simply an acronym and “people should get over it” — is just being stupid and missing the entire point…while failing miserably.
Going solely by the headline, I was expecting an article about how the developers never fix the well known usability problems compared to Photoshop because they’re expert users and DGAF about appealing to new users.
Instead it’s an article about how developers never fix the well known problem of an offensive name because they like being “edgy” and DGAF about appealing to new users.
If you’re going to make an ancient argument that was dumb af even then you may as well go full GeoCities with animated gifs and shit. HTML5 will let you reimplement <blink> and <marquee>.
Can they just insist it’s pronounced like jimp and sidestep the issue? Imgur, .gif, GNOME, GIPHY get to set their own rules on pronunciation.
Pack up lads. We solved it. Back to jimp.
That’s brilliant.
