Technology

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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").

*sigh* not this nonsense again.

GIMP was named after “GNU Image Manipulation Program”

Also this.

Huh. I had to take a quick glance at the timestamp of this article to make sure it wasn't old, as this was the same issue that inspired a short-lived fork a few years ago.

I get where this article's coming from, as I got where the people trying to fork it under a different name were too, however for better or worse I think what matters even more to people is that the software works well and has a good UX. If I remember right, I think Glimpse intended to focus on improving the UX but it didn't last long enough to do much in that regard.

Better than my memory though, here's an article that gives some insight into what went into the cessation of its development.

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.

I assume this article is about how I want to pull my hair out when trying to do anything in that program because everything feels so obtuse and weird and nothing else.

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 and .

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.

People are too sensitive today.

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.

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.

I stopped using it because of the dev's attitude towards people wanting them to change the name. I switched to Krita

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.