GIMP (acronym for ‘GNU Image Manipulation Program’) is the software graphical editing of reference environments on Linux/BSDand the closest thing to a competitor of Adobe Photoshop on the side of free software.
And takes retain this dominant role from 25 years ago, what weighs very much at the time that some developer consider creating a ‘fork’ (a fork of the source code to create another software-derived, as it was in his time LibreOffice compared to OpenOffice).
Normally, these ‘forks’ arise when there is a discrepancy in the bosom of the community of developers around the approach to be taken by the software: what functions should be incorporated or excluded, what targets take priority, etc In the case of GIMP, a group of developers announced middle of last year that they would start a fork of the same that bautizarían with the name of ‘Glimpse’ (‘Glimpse’ in Spanish).
Matter of names
The funny thing was the reason he gave for taking this step: the project GIMP had refused to change his name. Apparently, “gimp” is a word which in the anglo-saxon is used as a nickname insulting against persons with physical disabilities, as well as a reference to sexual practices BDSM.
The initiators of Glimpse, they argued that using GIMP could “cause pain to the marginalized communities”, to prevent that “were serious about free software in professional environments” and “to discourage the educational institutions of recommending the program due to legal concerns or moral” and because it could “distract” the students.
The makers of GIMP, alleging that the the public already identifies more “GIMP” with the graphic editor with those adjectives, and that a search a Google requires to go through several pages of results until you find one that is not related to the same.
“It is regrettable that we have to branch the whole project to change the name, but we believe that the discussions on the topic are in a stalemate”.
Its creators denied that the debate surrounding the name has been the only motivation of this fork… but the first version of Glimpse, the 0.1.0, was released in November of 2019 without changes other than the name and some details of the interface and the last version so far (the 0.1.2) only offers minor improvements in the translation, and the installation, the change of name of some tools and plugins, and removing some brushes judged “unnecessary” by the creators of the new project.
Icon / Logo Glimpse Say, yes, that their plans for version 1.0 go for porting the interface to GTK3 and create their own documentation, and that for future versions they want to re-write all the front-end in a new language, possibly D or Rust.
They claim they don’t see Glimpse as a duplication of efforts, which act on the basis of the spirit of the GNU license, and that contribute to the code of GIMP with the new functions that are developed to Glimpse. For now, if you want to take a look at this new graph editor, you can download it and install it on both Windows systems as Linux and Mac OS.
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The news
Glimpse, the ‘fork’ of GIMP created by misunderstandings over the project name
it was originally published in
Engadget
by
Marcos Merino
.
