Voice of the Masses: Should Gimp be renamed?
In the upcoming issue 200 of Linux Magazine, in the Linux Voice section, we have a feature on starting your own FOSS project. One aspect we focus on is the name – what should you call your new app or game? Quirky names are OK, but there are some pretty dodgy examples in the FOSS world.
One example is Gimp: a great app, a flagship open source project, but with a name that makes it very hard to sell to people. (Ever tried telling your Windows-using friends in the pub they should try Gimp on their computers? You get funny looks…)
Which leads us to this podcast’s question: should Gimp be renamed? And if so, what to? Are there any other projects which desperately need rebranding?
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About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
this pops up every few years. the name is unimportant. if it were they’d rename scunthorpe.
the main problem with gimp is that it has a vertical learning curve; vim is to nano as gimp is to ms-paint.
Gimp-s biggest problem is very, very slow development, not the learning curve because is tool for professionals and professionals wannabe.
They must find some model to speed up development, maybe they can copy Krita model.
I am not native english speaker so with years i wasn’t aware of the name meaning so i don’t have special opinion that.
so i don’t have special opinion about that.
PS: I missed word “about”, sorry 😉
Yes! I usually like quirky names, but gimp is an awful name, it hurts my Linux pride.
I can’t think of a nice name, the only thing that springs to my mind is “mage” – it has a bit of the word image in it and it evokes the magic that gimp can do.
I like Mage! Gimage too.
Another vote for Mage. Names are important. They get people’s attention, stick in their minds. Think of cars, movies, songs, books… cereals or anything really.
English is not my first language. I spent several years using Gimp happily without knowing the meaning of gimp. I think that it isn’t a problem for many users who don’t speak English. For us, Gimp is just the name of that open source photoshop.
Anyway, I think that it should be renamed. It’s a difficult task, but the longer we wait, more difficult it will become. It’s like using miles and yards because it’s too hard or too expensive to start using what the rest of the world is using. It creates a lot of problems and, sooner or later, you need to accept the change.
It should probably be pronounced djimp unlike djiffs. Actually the name is irrelevant in opinion. I would rather see some educational material on the net. Not the total noob kind but the kind that would show Photoshop users the real power of channels and how you CAN do serious s**t with The Gimp.
Speaking as a disabled person I see nothing to be offended by in the name. It is quirky, even a little fun, and it is possible for disabled people to laugh at themselves. Do Irish people hate Irish jokes or do they tell more, and better, ones than anyone else?
Please let’s not be so overly sensitive, especially where it is such a harmless thing, as to care one jot about the GIMP name.
If you really wan to help disabled people I can think of a great many better ways to do it than by reacting to the name of a piece of software!
No.
I wasn’t aware of the disabled connotations of the word gimp, only the bdsm sex slave pulp fiction portrayal. Either definition doesn’t really help introduce the product to new people.
I quite like “Mage” as suggested by Mike.
Yes, simply because asking an IT administrator if installing “The Gimp” is OK gets you some funny looks!
It’s probably been around too long to change the name now, and I think there’s something quite nice in the quirk of it. Agree with Luke video that I’d rather see some good videos that show GIMP as a serious replacement for p***shop. There are some great tools for photographers on Linux, but seeing how to pull them together into a serious workflow is something I’ve always had trouble finding resources on.
The name does not bother me. It has left any other meaning behind long ago, and only means the image software when used, for me. But then again, I am not a native English speaker, so that might have something to do with it.
But I could see a name change if we got Scribus, Inkscape and Gimp under one roof. Create a suite, and make the interfaces the same, or at least a lot more similar. Inkscape is furthest along, Gimp is alright, and Scribus is lagging a bit behind. Why reinvent the wheel? Get together and set a standard. There are so much collaboration between the projects as it is. just one more step.
If that happened, I could support a name change.
Gimp, Inkscape, and Scribus under one roof, love the idea. Name it “Gistalt”?
I have no problem with the name. When I first came across Gimp, I thought it was a rather quirky name, much like the naming of a lot of other open source software. It hasn’t stopped me from using it. In fact, I like the quirkiness of the name.
It should be merged with Inkscape and renamed to “Creatique Artisan Bespoke Cloud Studio 7 CMYK Special Edition”. Or just “Gink”, perhaps?
Linux world (and FOSS in general) is based on weird naming. One name is being picked from the start, and then the word simply spreads out. Like Open Office Org a few years ago, that the last part of the name didn’t made much sense to lots of people outside Linux as a name of a product. But this is the beauty of Linux, consisting of landmark weird names that don’t make much sense but are always attached to programs that give commercial ones a run for their money, and then some. So no changes for me about GIMP or anything else.
Absolutely it should be renamed. At a certain point any open source project has to move on from being a niche replacement to something that is taken seriously in professional circles. They have to do this in order to hopefully draw more funding and maintain (or increase) feature parity with their proprietary cousins. Inkscape and Krita are the two that come to mind that are doing that the most successfully at the moment.
It’s a parasitical relationship in some regard; in order to be taken seriously in professional adoption you have to approach feature parity, but in order to have the time and funding to approach feature parity, you have to court the professional adoption.
Gimp, as it stands, has been comparatively stagnant in that regard. There has been some movement recently towards 2.10, but even that has been nearly a decade in coming. Meanwhile Inkscape, Krita, Scribus and a host of others are lapping them in terms of development and at least a small level of professional adoption.
Am I saying that it’s the name that is holding it back? Not necessarily. But a rebranding is required to get it back into people’s consciousness after spending a decade now in slow development obscurity.
Yes!
Gnu Image Manipulation Program is too long, how about GIMP?? 😉
YES! It’s ridiculous to suggest “gimping a photo” should be in our vocabulary.
NO! The look on their faces when you ask if they “gimped that photo.” 🙂
No.
It’s kind of been a joke (almost) for so much of it’s existence that replacing Wilbur with Gnu”s herd, the name /just stuck/ – i.e. it’s never been /intended/ as a (an) unfortunate name, so just accept that some words may have two meanings, it’s been the ability of economists (I call them cysts) to justify their way of naming – nomenclature is seriously the /least/ of our problems. Don’t you?!
GIMP is quite a versatile tools, so what about renaming to “spanner” ?
I have used the gimp for years and never thought about the name… after reading the above thread i suggest Gmage;
incorporates magic, GCC or GNU, Image Manipulation, and has a shade of that disgustingly popular trend for naming everything Iblah (Ipod, Icar, Iwank etc).
this would be particularly appropriate if the developers were working on a suite as suggested above…