Watch it, you GIMP - Glimpse project founded to avoid branding that some find offensive

[dalekphalm]

13 hours ago, Vode said:

gimp
[ gimp ]
noun
a flat trimming of silk, wool, or other cord, sometimes stiffened with wire, for garments, curtains, etc.
a coarse thread, usually glazed, employed in lacemaking to outline designs.

Where is the offense?

Words have more than one definition.

 

We can debate whether there's any merit to changing the name of the software, but the term "gimp", referring to a person who is disabled in some way (usually walking with a limp), is about 4 times as old as the software known as "GIMP".

 

It maybe isn't a well known term outside of North America, but I've known what "gimp" means for as long as I can remember.

[Unixsystem]

Lots of folks who never played San Andreas in this thread. 

[mr moose]

It's funny watching people over react and whine about a name change they think was caused by over reaction.

 

It's really not a deep seeded issue guys.  Some people who work on GIMP think it will spread further if it had a different name, this is nothing new in marketing and is very common.    If the fork fails it fails, it's just one groups project that failed. The world will not end because someone thought GIMP would be more popular if it was called Glimpse.

 

Get over it already.

[Andreas Lilja]

The software is lame anyhow. Pun not intended.

[Beskamir]

So how long until some idiot renames git?

[poochyena]

glimpse is a much better name. Always thought gimp was a dumb name.

[poochyena]

6 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

It maybe isn't a well known term outside of North America, but I've known what "gimp" means for as long as I can remember.

I live in north america and never heard the term used in that way. I had no idea it was a slang term for people who limp. How often do you hear people use the word in that way?

[dalekphalm]

2 minutes ago, poochyena said:

I live in north america and never heard the term used in that way. I had no idea it was a slang term for people who limp. How often do you hear people use the word in that way?

It’s less common these days, but I’m an adult, and most adults don’t say things like that in public. 

 

When I was younger, it was quite commonly used as an insult.

[Nowak]

13 hours ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Urban dictionary somehow always manages to turn every single word into a sexual reference. lmao

 

On this topic, is every single word offensive at this point? Like wtf.

You could go like "spin" like how Vinesauce Vinny does to me and I'd burst out laughing because that's where my humor is now

[justpoet]

Their offensiveness about being offended offends my sense of offensiveness.

 

GIMP stands for exactly what it is, but alas is indeed an acronym.  Glimpse would make more sense for something to replace Lightroom or Aperture, rather than an image editor, though I think they were trying to keep some of the original name intact in the letters.  I'm not a fan of the rename…I'd much rather see GNU IMP and it get a geeky mascot to match…though that might lead to some confusion with folks thinking it associated with BSD…not to be confused with BDSM.

 

For those who mentioned other common program names…

Premier comes from movie premiers.  Traktor is DJ software for dealing with tracks, playing on the fact that it was more digital and geek and tech at the time than spinning records or discs.

 

BTW, glimpsing something is not always considered good either, has meanings in crime and magic, etc…so…they should really try a little harder if they're actually offended at word associations.

[Euchre]

So next, it will become inappropriate to ask someone to touch your tty.

[Vode]

6 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Words have more than one definition.

 

We can debate whether there's any merit to changing the name of the software, but the term "gimp", referring to a person who is disabled in some way (usually walking with a limp), is about 4 times as old as the software known as "GIMP".

 

It maybe isn't a well known term outside of North America, but I've known what "gimp" means for as long as I can remember.

It's a joke.

 

If you're offended by such inconsequential stuff in your life you are gonna have a hard time in the real world and waste your time with bullshit rather than focusing on the really important stuff. Too many snowflakes in our world today, not enough pragmatists and realists. I can understand women talking about this topic and raising the alarm, but not men.

[williamcll]

I'm still on adobe CS4

 

Also Adobe photoshop CS2 is mostly free these days.

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, poochyena said:

 How often do you hear people use the word in that way?

 

I hear people use it all the time to reference what  a company has done to a product they no longer wish to support or want people to move on from.   Over the last few years the term nerfed seems to have become popular (at least on the net):

 

some examples of people using the term to highlight something that they believe has been made lame:

 

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/12/359543951733141457/?ctp=3

Quote

Will steam be gimped out slowly by patches MS will implement in favor of MS own UWP?

 

 

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/amd-ryzen-3900x-apparently-being-gimped-by-bad-bios-that-alot-if-not-most-reviewers-werent-even-aware-of.3497691/

 

Quote

3900x apparently being gimped by bad bios

 

 

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11413260

 

Quote

Any true "linux distro" released by MS will have gimped out tools.

 

And of course how many people on these forums have referred to gameworks as "gimpworks"?  Quite a few.

 

https://www.gamespot.com/forums/system-wars-314159282/more-evidence-shows-nvidia-gpus-losing-performance-32925136/?page=9

 

Quote

The gimping is NVIDIA's Gamework related business model.

 

 

 

As people should be able to see, the term has a negative connotation in the tech world, is it not surprising some of the developers want to distance themselves from it?

[LAwLz]

I don't think this issue is as black and white as some might seem. Personally, I am not sure where I stand but I think I actually lean towards the same opinion as the one who made the fork.

 

I am not all that politically correct. I loathe when the word or fun police comes in and screeches about how everything is offensive and nobody should be allowed to do anything they don't like. But at the same time, GIMP has always been a pretty poor name. Not just because of it being an "ableist" term but also because it has the sexual connotation, and "gimping" means making something worse.

 

But at the same time, GIMP has a long established name in the software community. Whenever some program changes name or get forked I think most people miss the news about it, and then get confused when they go to download it. If GIMP had changed the official fork to Glimpse my first thought when downloading it would probably have been "oh crap, I downloaded the wrong program".

 

I gotta admire the person who did this though. Instead of pushing and harassing developers to change projects (which has sadly gotten quite common) this person actually did what was suggested. Make your own fork.

 

I do think Glimpse sounds weird though. It's not as loaded with "baggage" as GIMP, but Glimpse doesn't sound like an image manipulation tool. As someone said earlier, it sounds more like an image viewer if anything. Maybe that's because "glimpse" literally mean a brief look? It's like naming a music creation software "hearing", or a video editing program "view".

[dalekphalm]

8 hours ago, valdyrgramr said:

It's our word.  >O

Who is “we” in your context? If you mean “we” the OSS community? No... the insult “gimp” entered common language in the 1920’s. 

7 hours ago, Vode said:

It's a joke.

 

If you're offended by such inconsequential stuff in your life you are gonna have a hard time in the real world and waste your time with bullshit rather than focusing on the really important stuff. Too many snowflakes in our world today, not enough pragmatists and realists. I can understand women talking about this topic and raising the alarm, but not men.

Why do you think I’m offended by this, simply because I corrected your “joke” with factual information?

 

I do always find it humorous when people who claim to be against getting offended... well... act offended when offered counterpoint information. 

 

Does it bother you that I posted another

definition that gives credibility to the people who want to fork the program?

[vorticalbox]

I've seen a few issues in GitHub where people complain about the use of terms such as master and slave, this wave of political correctness has started to go too far the other side of the line.

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, vorticalbox said:

I've seen a few issues in GitHub where people complain about the use of terms such as master and slave, this wave of political correctness has started to go too far the other side of the line.

I'd say that probably depends on where you live.

 

The UK itself didn't have to deal with too much slavery (as in, it didn't happen that much there). In the US, however, the words "master" and "slave" are much more loaded due to the... uh, unpleasant history associated with the words.

 

Sometimes things do go too far. But sometimes they don't. It's not always black and white like that.

[NinJake]

Just call it the "Tight Image Transforming Software"

 

The TITS, for short.

 

No matter what the name is, I'll always opt for the open source variant over something like Photoshop when necessary. This is mainly because I rarely have to actually use this type of software.

[LAwLz]

3 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

I do always find it humorous when people who claim to be against getting offended... well... act offended when offered counterpoint information. 

I don't think it's fair to look at it like that.

Sure both sides are getting offended, but there are some big differences.

When the PC crowd gets offended they often push for legislation to silence the things they do not like. If they don't like something then nobody should be allowed to do it.

When the politically incorrect side gets offended it's because someone is trying to take freedoms (freedom in the sense that you are free to do something) away from them.

 

This is not one of these instances, but there have been a worrying amount of legislation and vigilante "justice" being carried out by the PC crowd in the last couple of years.

 

 

 

2 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

I'd say that probably depends on where you live.

 

The UK itself didn't have to deal with too much slavery (as in, it didn't happen that much there). In the US, however, the words "master" and "slave" are much more loaded due to the... uh, unpleasant history associated with the words.

 

Sometimes things do go too far. But sometimes they don't. It's not always black and white like that.

I don't get why slavery has anything to do with if a term is "offensive or not". Do people not understand context and intent these days?

No words are bad on their own. It is the reason why someone says something that makes a word bad.

I bet most people will agree that the word "nigger" in these two sentences are widely different in terms of how racist they are:

Quote

"I don't think nigger is a bad word in and of itself

and

Quote

You stupid fucking nigger

 

Just like the word "slave" in these two sentences are on widely different parts of the "offensive spectrum":

Quote

This switch is the master switch, and this switch is the slave switch.

and

Quote

Some people deserve to be slaves. I wish I could own some.

 

 

 

Also, isn't it time we stop with all the sensitivity regarding slavery?

It's been 150-200 years and people still think it's a sensitive subject? There is not a single person alive today who has experienced being a slave (legally) in the US.

Hell, it's been almost 250 years since it started becoming illegal in the US.

 

Imagine if we started treating viking history like we treat the history of slavery. Oh you wear a helmet with a horn? That means you dress up as barbaric person who wants to rape and pillage!

You like drinking mead? Careful, some people might think that you view yourself as a viking, which means you want to hang people upside down, carve eagles into their backs, and hack off their ribs one by one with an axe!

Should I feel shame and guilt towards people in Norway because a thousand years ago some of my ancestors raped and pillaged their ancestors?

[poochyena]

9 hours ago, mr moose said:

some examples of people using the term to highlight something that they believe has been made lame

none of those examples are being used towards a person with a limp. Its being used to mean that a product is being reduced in quality.

[dalekphalm]

13 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I don't think it's fair to look at it like that.

Sure both sides are getting offended, but there are some big differences.

When the PC crowd gets offended they often push for legislation to silence the things they do not like. If they don't like something then nobody should be allowed to do it.

When the politically incorrect side gets offended it's because someone is trying to take freedoms (freedom in the sense that you are free to do something) away from them.

 

This is not one of these instances, but there have been a worrying amount of legislation and vigilante "justice" being carried out by the PC crowd in the last couple of years.

Not that I agree with all instances of being "politically correct", but I do agree that some things should not be in use. Society as a whole needs to decide what is acceptable and what isn't, and no matter what we agree on, there will always be people who think anything and everything should be acceptable.

13 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I don't get why slavery has anything to do with if a term is "offensive or not". Do people not understand context and intent these days?

No words are bad on their own. It is the reason why someone says something that makes a word bad.

I bet most people will agree that the word "nigger" in these two sentences are widely different in terms of how racist they are:

and

 

Just like the word "slave" in these two sentences are on widely different parts of the "offensive spectrum":

and

 

 

 

Also, isn't it time we stop with all the sensitivity regarding slavery?

It's been 150-200 years and people still think it's a sensitive subject? There is not a single person alive today who has experienced being a slave (legally) in the US.

Hell, it's been almost 250 years since it started becoming illegal in the US.

You have to consider the ramifications of slavery in the US.

 

Yes, slavery was outlawed 150 years ago. That doesn't mean that we aren't still to this day dealing with the fallout of slavery. Sure, no African American today was ever legally enslaved, nor is there anyone alive today that lived through legal slavery, but the extension of slavery, which is the systemic racism against black people, was very much part of the status quo even as far as 50 years ago.

 

So while slavery itself is a very old issue, we're still dealing with the fallout of that. Sweeping it under the rug ignores all of the consequences that black Americans still have to deal with on a daily basis.

13 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Imagine if we started treating viking history like we treat the history of slavery. Oh you wear a helmet with a horn? That means you dress up as barbaric person who wants to rape and pillage!

To be fair, most people don't even have a correct concept of what "Vikings" actually were.

13 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

You like drinking mead? Careful, some people might think that you view yourself as a viking, which means you want to hang people upside down, carve eagles into their backs, and hack off their ribs one by one with an axe!

Should I feel shame and guilt towards people in Norway because a thousand years ago some of my ancestors raped and pillaged their ancestors?

The difference between that and this is that people in the US still deal with racism, and people alive today lived through black segregation, etc.

 

Now, I personally don't think we need to outlaw the words "Master" or "Slave" - but I can still understand why those terms, even used correctly and innocently, can make people uncomfortable.

[dalekphalm]

7 minutes ago, poochyena said:

none of those examples are being used towards a person with a limp. Its being used to mean that a product is being reduced in quality.

Yeah and why are they doing that? Because the term means something that is "crippled" - in this case the software, but the only reason they can use it in that manner is because it meant "crippled" people first.

 

And it's not even just "crippled" in the sense that they can't walk properly or something. It means "less than". When someone calls you a gimp or a cripple, they're saying you're not as good as a human as they are.

 

Just like if someone says a piece of software is gimped or crippled, it means the software is useless shit.

[Curious Pineapple]

Anyone remember the GIICM?

[NumLock21]

I'm glad their are sticking to their name and not change it because those selected few only see the bad meaning behind it. Those people can either man up or take a hike.