Apologies for the top post. My phone won't permit anything else. With regard to the Firefox comparison, if the name was the only difference you'd have a valid argument. But unless you can line up the potential contributors who were put off by the name you're going to have to take into account that gimp's target audience is tiny compared to that of Firefox (High-end 'pro' photographers versus everyone who wants to view web pages... that is to say, everyone.). Since Foss development is done by users of the software (I'm guessing that the number of volunteer Foss developers who have no interest in using the program that they are working on can be counted on the fingers of one hand) this is the primary limiting factor on the number of developers.

Jon (who frankly doesn't care what it's called and suspects that very few people actually do)

Nathan Summers a écrit :

Grr, when did GMail change the default from reply-to-list to reply-to-author?

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 4:34 AM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

28 апр. 2015 г. 8:22 пользователь "Sam Bagot" написал:

Renames have worked in the past as I see it and for the most part, as I'm sure you've heard people consider before, a product named gimp can't succeed against a product named professionally like PhotoShop.

We do not make GIMP to compete against Photoshop.

GIMP _is_ used at schools. Also, USA is not the only country in the world. Not even the largest one out there.

So our target audience is non-English speaking photographic professionals that don't already like Photoshop? I just don't see that as a very big niche.

Furthermore, I suggest you exercise nastyness elsewhere. This is a mailing list for discussing development of GIMP.

There's nothing nasty about what he said. The name of the program actually is a serious impediment to the development of GIMP, and if it's not to be discussed here, then where? Sam makes several excellent points about why GIMP doesn't get the kind of professional contributions that other projects of similar stature such as the Linux kernel or Firefox, and I think there's a lot of truth to what he says.

You can say that you don't care about what GIMP means in English out of some egalitarian principal that all languages should be treated equally, but as a practical matter that means that you're putting a huge barrier to developing in place for the largest part of the software industry GDP. That has consequences. For example, I wouldn't have wanted my name associated with something called "GIMP" if I had known what the word meant when I started contributing to it. I highly doubt I'm the only one. Are you sure it's a good idea to shut out contributions from all but the most naive and the most calloused of the English-speaking world?

I personally consider the "we can get people to overlook the connotations of the name" idea as a failed hypothesis at this point. I'm not sure how aware the non-native-English speakers are of how far the name is outside of the Overton Window, but I can assure you it's not even close. It's not worth the effort to try to make it socially acceptable. You can choose to ignore that fact, but you can't deny that it has a very large influence on the pace of development.

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