kerravonsen | The Program Formerly Known as GIMP (Reply)

Due to mastodon.au currently being down, I was looking around on mastodon.art, which I'm not as active on. And I started looking at the admin announcements. And about three or four announcements back, they say a few things about the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). They explain in a non-hysterical way that the name GIMP was not chosen innocently -- the creators of the program admit that it was due to the word "gimp" used in "Pulp Fiction" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP#cite_note-8). Therefore they would have known that the word was a slur, and they have been told repeatedly that it was a slur and have not changed the name.

IMHO, I'm all for giving people the benefit of the doubt (e.g. Coon Cheese was named after Mr. Coon who invented the specific process for that cheese, and therefore I am certain that they did not intend for it to be racist) but if somebody knew from the get-go that the name they were using was an insult, and went ahead with it anyway, that's a problem. Perhaps they considered it a kind of self-depreciating humour -- that they felt their program to be such a humble offering that it was a cripple, but many people have not taken it that way.

So... I'm going to be changing all references that I can when I'm talking about the Gnu Image Manipulation Program. In the future, I'll refer to it as GnuIMP. I'm not going to even attempt to change past posts, that's too difficult to track down and alter, but at least I'll be changing my wording from now on.

Yes, it's a small thing, but it is easily done, so why shouldn't I be courteous if it doesn't cost me much?

I had always wondered why they had chosen such an odd name for the program, but I had assumed that it was inadvertent.