Quoting f...@gingerbreadday.com: > Who was the clever soul that came up with the name GIMP?
Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball, the programmers who started the GIMP project, decided upon the name. The question has indeed been asked before (I suspect you were being facetious), with the answer being provided by Peter Mattis when asked back in 1997 by Zachary Beane of The GIMP Gazette (http://www.xach.com/gg/1997/1/profile/1/). "It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing out name ideas. It only took a few more minutes to determine what the 'G' stood for. "And to make the matter clear, the GIMP originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program, but has since been dubbed GNU software by Richard Stallman (with our agreement). Spencer and I decided that GNU Image Manipulation Program is a better usage of the 'G'." ----------------------- As to some of those who feel the name may be inappropriate and should be changed, I would point out that of the first 100 hits returned by my Google search for the term "gimp", only five of the hits were unrelated to our beloved software application: two dictionary entries & a Wikipedia page listing alternative usages, a website for the physically impaired, and a hobbyist site dealing with embroidery. The other 95 hits were directly related to the GNU Image Manipulation Program (and the dictionary and Wikipedia entries mentioned it in addition to the word's other meanings). I doubt that there are many brand marks that share a more dominant association with their respective products and to my mind it would be extremely foolhardy to relinquish this mindshare that GIMP has accrued over the years. _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
