I’ve never heard the word gimp without reference to the software or the clothing style. Whatever other meanings it might have had in the part are unused anachronism in my experience.
> we believe that a joke name some find offensive and distracting presents an unnecessary obstacle to wider adoption
That could be a valid theory if GIMP wasn't the most popular open source raster editor, while none of the forks come even close
Besides, there are at least a few billion people in the world, including me, that haven't watched pulp fiction in English and GIMP for us just means GNU Image Manipulation Program
And your case for a _global_ (Hello Americans, you are not isolated, your software is used worldwide) experience is totally irrelevant.
We used GIMP in Spain for a lot of time and no one knew the original meaning of "Gimp". Ever. Neither for the BDSM context, nor for the "cripple" one. Just an image editor.
I believe you're arguing against a strawman, as I never made an argument for a "global experience". My experiences indeed occurred in America, where the name GIMP was an obstacle to its adoption. It's a linguistic issue, so it shouldn't surprise anyone if it differs with language.
Is not a strawman if GIMP changed it's name, this would effect world users. There is a very odd prudishness in the US. Is somewhat the same in the UK, but the US turns that knob full crank.
I think I’d you were to compare countries of the world, you would find Western Europe to be unusual in its lack of prudishness.
In Europe you are free to do things and not be judged outside your microcosm communities standard. In the US, everyone eventually gets judged by mainstream standards. I would guess that Europe’s history of sectarian violence and war, has lead to this pervasive non judge mental attitude with regards subcultures.
Great point. I'd also add that in the US, individuals that consider themselves to be religous is much higher, by a high margin. As the commenter just above me points out, there are many english names of things that are "rude" words in other countries.
Edit: Latin America doesn't have that prudishness.
Do you think that cockroachdb, squid, seamonkey, wine, f-spot (talk about jokes...) are better names?
do you know that mist means manure and angel means fishing rod in German, in Swedish kiss means pee, slut means end, final, fart means speed and in Polish fart is good luck.
And I'll let you lookup what smocking, flipper or scotch mean in Italian.
I mean, have you ever considered that many things you say over there could have a complete different meaning here but that didn't stop you anyway?
Indeed. It attempts to be a more sensitive name, which I appreciate, but it ends up being a pure negative for the vast majority of the planet save for ~500 million people, as it will lead to appellation and branding fragmentation that will make using and learning the software more difficult, all in order to appease anglophone sensitivities. Anglocentrism in tech as it applies to user facing elements is a very big problem in my opinion.
A "glimpse" of the tremendous changes made to Glimpse in the latest release:
Windows Improvements
Translation files are now included in the MSI installer #240
Glimpse Image Editor and GNU Image Manipulation Program no longer share the same task bar icon #247
Windows installer now supports upgrading existing installations #314
UI Improvements
“Color” icon pack and “Gray” UI theme have been reinstated #232
The “fun” brushes have now been removed #286
Upstream contributors and translators are now appropriately credited through the UI #228
Renamed the “Gimpressionist” plug-in to “Impressionist” #267
Fixed various problems in translation files #230 #238
Fixed text color chooser that still used Wilber icon and upstream name #250
Fixed “legacy” UI theme in Snapcraft #271
Code Improvements
Moved build folder to build-aux to follow GNOME conventions #233
Added packaging documentation to the snap and flatpak folders to match windows-msi #305
Fixed make check so we can produce source tarballs for Linux distribution maintainers #251
GIMP is still working on getting GEGL into everything after 20 years. Glimpse is allowed a little time to discuss and decide exactly what to do. That won't show in a commit log on a project that's less than a year old.
OK thx for the link as it is a factual proof of life for the project. But unfortunatly, this link to the mixed bugtrack/RFC shows the patent pbroblem with this project : after reading the RFC it shows that it is up to the community to provide the most basic goals for this fork, long after the project was initiated, which underscores the original sin of Glimpse. The only reason to fork was the name and the dev team had no other structured strategy to provide other enhancement at the beginning of the project.
I do not think this the spirit of the Open Source philosophy and morover I feel sad about the whole story. The numerous people behind GIMP have been giving their time and skills for more than on decade to provide the only decent free alternative to Photoshop to millions of young artists, students and professionals who were not wealthy enough to pay for Adobe products. And then come a bunch of wankers who shame these great people for an obscure US-centered issue about the name of the app...
How about CHUMPS - a fork of glimpse that benefits from the 20+ years of GIMP contributor effort and the professional UI of glimpse contributors effort (should such a thing materialize) but is being offered as a white-label to be branded for pay to whatever organization or movement that feels like it needs an open-source image editor that uncompromisingly represents its values ?
do closed-source image editors like photoshop have a friendly plugin architecture?
is there an OSS ecosystem already locked onto adobe, or is there an opportunity for gimp / glimpse to become a platform as well as a batteries-included product
Americans should learn the rest of the world doesn't go around them and GIMP is not offensive to the 90% of the population which just has a basic/technical/specialized English level with zero knowledge of the BDSM jargon.
If some Spanish guy named the image editor as "cojo", no one would care. Albeit it would be even worse commercially (cojo means one-legged, but also can mean unfinished or unpolished, as for lacking a base).
Also, bonus track: it can also mean the first singular person of the verb "coger" in the present form, which in Spain just means to grab/to take, (I grab/take for "cojo") but it means "to fuck" in South America. We in Spain are trully aware of this and no one cares to switch from "coger" to "tomar" in order to talk to the rest of the Spanish speakers across the Atlantic. They know our "coger" well and they are used to it.
This misses the point about why it is bad to offend people. A lot of people may find something perfectly acceptable, but that is no reason to be rude to the ones who do find it offensive. In this case there are negligible downsides to simple using a different word, and this makes the product more inclusive to a large number of people (maybe small as a percentage, but a large number nonetheless).
Names definitely do make products more or less inclusive, and this is a core part of internationalization. If you call your product 'Anti-Christ', expect that some people will not want to use it. Most communities find certain things offensive, and it is a good idea to be considerate of their feelings and steer clear of them when there is nothing at stake.
If this project were just a name change, I would agree that it is a waste of time, but they are also making UI improvements, which in my opinion are badly needed in GIMP. A name change is fine in the context of a UI overhaul and maybe also a good idea since the interface is pretty foundational to the most critical part of the application.
Well there is 5% of American ppl. And 95% of the rest of the world. GIMP has been a highly international and famous software for decades and the vast majority of the human beings were not aware that GIMP had a negative meaning in the US.
If ever it appears in 6 month that "Glimpse" means "Dirty ol' prostitute" in finnish slang or whatever, do you think that there is going to be another fork with a new name in order to show support for old prostitutes and for the finnish culture ?
I'm not sure. I work mainly within that 5% and that is where the name GIMP was a barrier for me. If Glimpse was around at the time, it would have been a good alternative.
For what it's worth, the Glimpse FAQ claims to have checked the meaning of "Glimpse" in every known language.
Those who spend time and energy in this Glimpse project will never help the inclusion of anyone. They just repackage a software with a new name and a new theme. If the inclusion of some people was their priority, they should work as social workers. They're just wankers who think that renaming other's work will make the world better...
I disagree, this is a valid point. Making everything about the perceptions of Americans is very bad for open source software. It is a fact that this is a fork of a very well established open source project that will at best fragment branding and documentation because the name is offensive to some puritan Americans.
I absolutely guarantee that if this name was a mildly offensive reference to something in pop culture in say Nigeria, no one would care.
Leading with an insult like "Americans should learn the rest of the world doesn't go around them" makes it flamebait regardless of how valid the point is. HN commenters need to make their valid points without provocative swipes.
How valid the point is is questionable, since it makes many assumptions. But an invalid point can make for a fine HN comment too, if it's in good faith and follows the site guidelines. HN threads are for curious conversation, which often involves getting things wrong. And we don't have a truth machine in any case.
I agree that the wording of the first statement is provocative. I don't think it's an insult, and I don't think that it's wrong. And honestly I don't believe that a provocative comment is necessarily a bad thing, provocation certainly has it's place in discussion.
And while "Americans should learn the rest of the world doesn't go around them" is provocative, in the americentric context of hackernews and essentially nowhere else, I fail to see how it a good faith interpretation of the post results in the conclusion that it was posted solely to provoke anger. It rather seems to me that it is provocative in order to force the reader to consider their personal biases.
While you would certainly be in your rights at Ycombinator to remove provocative speech, provocation made directly against the status quo or against the dominant zeitgeist or group in a forum is most certainly useful. Provocative comments such as these help remove pretense and veneer around arguments for and against dominant positions, and when they are made from the less dominant position they help remove the gravitas of more widely held or convenient ideas.
I'm not saying that this necessarily applies fully to the comment we are talking about, but stating the comment provocatively absolutely has it's uses. I also disagree that the intent of the comment was to provoke a nationalistic flame war, that depends wholly on the answers and the subsequent responses, and from what I've seen the answers to this comment are much more intellectually interesting that in the ~1 other thread, and I think if it was allowed to progress further would have been more interesting still.
This is because it's the only top level comment that addresses the implicit subtext of the purpose of the project. There is massive anglo- and frankly americano-centrism in the tech community. Anyone who makes any decisions in tech communities acts or is expected to act inside of the context of English, American culture, and so on. This leads to, in my experience, a lot of programmers and other people in tech who's working culture is American culture and whose working language is the English language to inform the landscape of tech. This is almost never addressed, except for cursory comments that are almost always inconsequential.
The very fact that tech culture is so overwhelmingly americano-centric and that almost nothing is ever done, or that it is almost never addressed when relevant, is why I think that provocativeness when addressing the situation can certainly be warranted. In fact, this is the main function of provocativeness in discourse, because it forces the dominant narrative to be questioned. I believe this to be in the good faith of allowing the discussion to go forwards. It is true that the spirit of the website is to be curious, and if the community did act in that spirit unavailingly all of the time equitably, provocation would not be useful. But this is not the case, neither will it ever be the case when the subject isn't objective tech, but instead deeply rooted almost unconscious assumptions about the world that frankly this community is not generally known for addressing well, direct provocation is, to me warranted.
If you take the example of this project for example, the entirety of the project is an exercise in Americentrism. Literally all of it uses the "default" American cultural point of view in order to make prescriptive recommendation about what is culturally better or worse for an international community. And yet, this is not even mentioned in FAQ, nor in any other top level comment. You won't find anyone questioning this, and indeed you will certainly find throughout the website countless examples of people celebrating the Americentric nature of discourse in technology.
It is not secret that Americans, in general, are more egregious in their Americentrism than other cultural groups are about their own relative ethnocentrism. This is sentence is, I believe ...
I have no idea where you get the idea that this is an "American" thing. All the people listed on the project page are outside America. This seems to be the key point your entire argument rests on, and it's just not valid.
edit: I didn't read your essay because, on a skim, it seems like more irrelevant soapboxing about Americans.
I didn't say this is an American thing is. I said that American culture is the "default" culture of tech, and that's a problem. There are very many names of projects, open source or otherwise that are problematic in one specific culture, and that's almost never seen as an issue (rightfully)
Provocative generalizations about countries are flamebait and against the site guidelines. This isn't hard to understand, nor is it hard to make one's substantive points without such provocations, if one wants to. We ask everyone to do that for the good of the community. It's all too easy for these things to break into outright flamewar, which benefits no one and destroys what this site exists for.
In case it's helpful, two facts are (1) HN is a highly international community, at least 50% outside the US, and (2) we do this moderation independently of which specific nation(s) a commenter has a problem with.
I'm afraid you're making nationalistic generalizations in here that amount to flamebait in their own right ("Americans, in general, are more egregious [etc]"). Please don't do that.
I don't believe that claiming a group on average exhibits more of a characteristic is a generalization. And I don't think nationalism is when someone talks about average characteristics of the population of a nation.
EDIT: I forgot to add, I don't really think that a community with 50% of it's citizens being in one country is highly international.
It is, relative to the assumptions people usually make about the HN community. The other common wrong assumption is that HN is concentrated in or somehow represents Silicon Valley. In fact less than 10% of the community is in SV and the majority of the userbase, if anything, identifies against it.
Incidentally, many of the HN members in the US come from other countries, so 50% is a lower bound.
By the way, I think you may be using more precise definitions of some of these words than I am. That's because I'm commenting about this strictly from a moderation point of view. If you post pejoratives about "average characteristics of the population of a nation", we're going to get a flamewar whether you intended it or not. And it's going to be about national characteristics, hence the phrase "nationalistic flamewar".
The thing we care about is convincing users not to post to HN in ways that are guaranteed to lead to shitty, nasty discussion. You're no doubt right that some of these topics can be discussed in ways that are not ideologically nationalistic, just like a high-energy physics lab can work with high temperatures without burning down the building, but this is the internet and those distinctions don't apply.
Imagine being half the commenters in this thread and getting so incredibly angry about people not liking a software name, so they decide to fork it. Isn't that the entire point of open source?
The cognitive dissonance is surprising. The same people who probably would have said being offended by the name "Gimp" makes you an SJW snowflake are now getting triggered by a fork using another name, because they're offended by political correctness.
"political correctness" is not innocuous thing. It drains the ideas and the energy of those who are indignated by some aspects of our world. These people should fight to change the world and they just change words. It is easier to fight on the symbolic level than in the real world. And in the same time the world goes on drifting as symbols will not stop it.
You could have expected that these Glimpse "symbolic heroes" would have invest time and energy to promote that people in the US do not use the word "gimp" anymore... Or even better they could have dedicated their life to help the disabled.
Nope they found it more useful to rename a Photoshop-like program...
It is the matter with the US so-called left. They are totally useless.
No, this is literally a completely innocuous thing and people are bent out of shape over it and acting exactly like the stereotypical leftists they complain about and it's hilarious.
You expected me to take your brick-post of a rant seriously and take time to engage in thoughtful debate with someone whose thesis is that American leftists are "useless," and that the Glimpse team are somehow hypocrites for not engaging in some kind of active, real-world activism when forking a software project?
No, sorry... I'm just here to ridicule people like yourself and the energy being expended here on virtue signaling outrage.
Furthermore, if it "drains [your] ideas and energy" when people ask you to not be a dick, then I don't think anyone really cares that your clearly amazing ideas aren't being represented. Go away.
There's nothing morally wrong with it at all. On the contrary, the moral argument behind free software is that the work belongs equally to everyone, not to the original authors. There's nothing in the free software ethos that requires "originality" as a prerequisite to redistribute software for any reason, including donations.
The only thing the Gimp authors have a moral claim to is the name and logo.
>No, this project does not intend to supplant the GNU Image Manipulation Program. You may have noticed we already link to their donations page throughout our documentation and we periodically donate a portion of our own funds to the upstream project.
I don't see anything that could be classified as "incredibly angry". Seems that people are mostly just bothered that they wasted their time looking at this only to find out the obscured fact that this is GIMP with a new name.
Alright I'll entertain this. I'm in GIMP right now. Used the circle selection tool to select a circle that I want to make a circle with. I looked under Selection and also under Tools > Selection Tools in the top menu, but I couldn't find a "trace selection button". I don't see such a button in the circle selection toolbox settings either. Genuinely baffled, I almost feel dumb for not being able to find it.
My point though, is in any other image editor, you click the circle tool and start making circles in 2 seconds.
This is great. The response for decades to suggestions to change the name was "fork it if you don't like the name." Someone finally took them up on it and we get to see what happens with two competing open source image editors.
> If you are offended by the fact we renamed the project, we suggest you continue using the GNU Image Manipulation Program instead of annoying our contributors and making more work for our moderators.
I don't mind the GIMP name and if Glimps is really just a rebranding I see no reason to use it. But if they're actually going to fix its glaring UX problems I'll be all over that.
89 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadRight?
That could be a valid theory if GIMP wasn't the most popular open source raster editor, while none of the forks come even close
Besides, there are at least a few billion people in the world, including me, that haven't watched pulp fiction in English and GIMP for us just means GNU Image Manipulation Program
In Europe you are free to do things and not be judged outside your microcosm communities standard. In the US, everyone eventually gets judged by mainstream standards. I would guess that Europe’s history of sectarian violence and war, has lead to this pervasive non judge mental attitude with regards subcultures.
As an Spaniard, I am sure they are a lot more prude than us, by experience.
do you know that mist means manure and angel means fishing rod in German, in Swedish kiss means pee, slut means end, final, fart means speed and in Polish fart is good luck.
And I'll let you lookup what smocking, flipper or scotch mean in Italian.
I mean, have you ever considered that many things you say over there could have a complete different meaning here but that didn't stop you anyway?
Why should we stop using GIMP then?
When they ask me (rarely) what software is that I simply answer "Photoshop for Linux, but gratis"
The name is fine.
Does Glimpse differ in this area or does it have plans to?
Windows Improvements
UI Improvements Code Improvements A real joke....You can see the issue tracker for a better idea of project activity: https://github.com/glimpse-editor/Glimpse/issues
is there an OSS ecosystem already locked onto adobe, or is there an opportunity for gimp / glimpse to become a platform as well as a batteries-included product
If some Spanish guy named the image editor as "cojo", no one would care. Albeit it would be even worse commercially (cojo means one-legged, but also can mean unfinished or unpolished, as for lacking a base).
Also, bonus track: it can also mean the first singular person of the verb "coger" in the present form, which in Spain just means to grab/to take, (I grab/take for "cojo") but it means "to fuck" in South America. We in Spain are trully aware of this and no one cares to switch from "coger" to "tomar" in order to talk to the rest of the Spanish speakers across the Atlantic. They know our "coger" well and they are used to it.
If this project were just a name change, I would agree that it is a waste of time, but they are also making UI improvements, which in my opinion are badly needed in GIMP. A name change is fine in the context of a UI overhaul and maybe also a good idea since the interface is pretty foundational to the most critical part of the application.
For what it's worth, the Glimpse FAQ claims to have checked the meaning of "Glimpse" in every known language.
This is a great example of offense being TAKEN, not given. Fake outrage.
I don't think any of the developers are American.
Edit: I should add that the comment would be fine without that initial swipe.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I absolutely guarantee that if this name was a mildly offensive reference to something in pop culture in say Nigeria, no one would care.
How valid the point is is questionable, since it makes many assumptions. But an invalid point can make for a fine HN comment too, if it's in good faith and follows the site guidelines. HN threads are for curious conversation, which often involves getting things wrong. And we don't have a truth machine in any case.
And while "Americans should learn the rest of the world doesn't go around them" is provocative, in the americentric context of hackernews and essentially nowhere else, I fail to see how it a good faith interpretation of the post results in the conclusion that it was posted solely to provoke anger. It rather seems to me that it is provocative in order to force the reader to consider their personal biases.
While you would certainly be in your rights at Ycombinator to remove provocative speech, provocation made directly against the status quo or against the dominant zeitgeist or group in a forum is most certainly useful. Provocative comments such as these help remove pretense and veneer around arguments for and against dominant positions, and when they are made from the less dominant position they help remove the gravitas of more widely held or convenient ideas.
I'm not saying that this necessarily applies fully to the comment we are talking about, but stating the comment provocatively absolutely has it's uses. I also disagree that the intent of the comment was to provoke a nationalistic flame war, that depends wholly on the answers and the subsequent responses, and from what I've seen the answers to this comment are much more intellectually interesting that in the ~1 other thread, and I think if it was allowed to progress further would have been more interesting still.
This is because it's the only top level comment that addresses the implicit subtext of the purpose of the project. There is massive anglo- and frankly americano-centrism in the tech community. Anyone who makes any decisions in tech communities acts or is expected to act inside of the context of English, American culture, and so on. This leads to, in my experience, a lot of programmers and other people in tech who's working culture is American culture and whose working language is the English language to inform the landscape of tech. This is almost never addressed, except for cursory comments that are almost always inconsequential.
The very fact that tech culture is so overwhelmingly americano-centric and that almost nothing is ever done, or that it is almost never addressed when relevant, is why I think that provocativeness when addressing the situation can certainly be warranted. In fact, this is the main function of provocativeness in discourse, because it forces the dominant narrative to be questioned. I believe this to be in the good faith of allowing the discussion to go forwards. It is true that the spirit of the website is to be curious, and if the community did act in that spirit unavailingly all of the time equitably, provocation would not be useful. But this is not the case, neither will it ever be the case when the subject isn't objective tech, but instead deeply rooted almost unconscious assumptions about the world that frankly this community is not generally known for addressing well, direct provocation is, to me warranted.
If you take the example of this project for example, the entirety of the project is an exercise in Americentrism. Literally all of it uses the "default" American cultural point of view in order to make prescriptive recommendation about what is culturally better or worse for an international community. And yet, this is not even mentioned in FAQ, nor in any other top level comment. You won't find anyone questioning this, and indeed you will certainly find throughout the website countless examples of people celebrating the Americentric nature of discourse in technology.
It is not secret that Americans, in general, are more egregious in their Americentrism than other cultural groups are about their own relative ethnocentrism. This is sentence is, I believe ...
edit: I didn't read your essay because, on a skim, it seems like more irrelevant soapboxing about Americans.
In case it's helpful, two facts are (1) HN is a highly international community, at least 50% outside the US, and (2) we do this moderation independently of which specific nation(s) a commenter has a problem with.
I'm afraid you're making nationalistic generalizations in here that amount to flamebait in their own right ("Americans, in general, are more egregious [etc]"). Please don't do that.
EDIT: I forgot to add, I don't really think that a community with 50% of it's citizens being in one country is highly international.
Incidentally, many of the HN members in the US come from other countries, so 50% is a lower bound.
By the way, I think you may be using more precise definitions of some of these words than I am. That's because I'm commenting about this strictly from a moderation point of view. If you post pejoratives about "average characteristics of the population of a nation", we're going to get a flamewar whether you intended it or not. And it's going to be about national characteristics, hence the phrase "nationalistic flamewar".
The thing we care about is convincing users not to post to HN in ways that are guaranteed to lead to shitty, nasty discussion. You're no doubt right that some of these topics can be discussed in ways that are not ideologically nationalistic, just like a high-energy physics lab can work with high temperatures without burning down the building, but this is the internet and those distinctions don't apply.
No, sorry... I'm just here to ridicule people like yourself and the energy being expended here on virtue signaling outrage.
"Calm down and keep polite"
hmmmmmmm
Nobody's arguing against real change, but I stand by my point: the people complaining about "political correctness" are usually thin-skinned.
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I do not get it. Maybe it is an american reference ? What do you mean ? (just curiosity, not a rethoric question)
The only thing the Gimp authors have a moral claim to is the name and logo.
Directly from their FAQ.
My point though, is in any other image editor, you click the circle tool and start making circles in 2 seconds.
Unfortunately this seems to be a mostly one person effort and is mostly about changing the name, so I'd be surprised it got far.
It's a shame GIMP has improved so little in the last decade or so. Compare it to Blender, which is an incredibly polished product comparatively.
Isn’t that ironic
That alone is reason enough to shun the project.
Douchey.