alt Hacker News" It is strange how the media exploration experiments I do in code seem to not really have much cultural worth in society."
Not to me, and -- this is a thing I keep harping on -- love it or not, I can explain why.
You live in a society, and as a result you have to do a little bit of homework on names, and what they mean, and how they are percieved by the outside world. It is SUPER interesting to me that the first bit of this interview is literally ABOUT NAMES, and that the following point is missed.
GIMP is a terrible name. Atrociously bad. And I still strongly believe it is a reason -- it might even be the PRIMARY reason -- why such an otherwise great tool did not grow in popularity.
Replies
Words have different meanings in different languages and regions, also words themselves change meaning over time.
I've seen GIMP deployed in British schools with no issues. We should all start being adults and stop fussing because some pixels on our screen might spell out a word that in a certain context and certain part of the world might be seen as offensive
It's my experience that every professional and educational setting I've tried to use the GIMP in has seen the name as a roadblock and had it swiftly rejected.
It's really a shame they were steadfast in that one baffling decision. It was so self-destructive to the project. I wonder what would have happened if they stayed with their original name IMP, or found a different Pulp Fiction reference to make.
If the dev team had a nickel for every time someone complained about the name, there would have enough money by now to fund the development of a UI revamp.
Now if they had a nickel for everytime someone complained about the bad UI...
I grew up as a native English speaker in an English country, and had to look up what gimp means. Should the name be changed? Yes. On the other hand, I have never encountered the word outside of the context of the image editing program. That is unusual, even for an offensive term. It leaves me with the feeling that someone dug up an obscure piece of slang in order to paint the project in a negative light. (I've been using open source for long enough to know that painting open source in a negative light was a thing. For example: it used to be common to paint supporters of open source as Communist, which is treasonous in some circles.)
Green Is My Pepper is a great name.
> You live in a society, and as a result you have to do a little bit of homework on names, and what they mean, and how they are percieved by the outside world.
Amem
If there's one point where OSS stands like a sore thumb (derogatory) is in everything that makes it welcoming to general users
Usability. Focus. Heck, even this strawberry of a low hanging fruit like the name cannot be solved by a nerd committee apparently.
Then honestly you can't complain when people don't use your sw
>how they are percieved by the outside world
The vast majority of the outside world does not perceive the name the way you do. Even the majority of English users doesn't, as most of them learned standard English as second language at school without being taught vulgar Anglo-American slang.
If you want to pursue linguistic sensitivity, the just direction is against anglophone domination, even if impractical. We should be taking power away from the most powerful and redistributing it back to the weak, not the other way around.
So, it is the anglophones who should stop calling people using a nasty word instead of expecting international, multilingual communities to adapt to their culture.