People who hate GIMP's name are not "FOSS haters". They just hate it when certain people in the FOSS community make the entire FOSS community look bad.

Here is a typical attempt to justify the name "GIMP", demanding that society change instead of admitting the name has obviously terrible meanings:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38236618

_c3ag>first thing that pops is a phrase of some biologist regards why evolution made plants green and not blue (physically, blue can absorb way more energy from the sun)... SPOILER: because makes the plantae organisms way more stable rather than performant (which opens up less windows for failings regards evolution). i use Gimp for digital collages, dead simple pixel-art and even composing a poem book for my beloved one! and that tool if it isn't perfect for the job, is probably about adjusting expectations ¶ why society can't re-signify a offensive word?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237328

DonHopkins on Nov 12, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

Sorry, but the number of people who have seen Pulp Fiction, plus the number of people who know derogatory terms for disabled people, is much greater than the number of people who know technical biological terms of art.

If the GIMP developers really want to score an edgy rhetorical point about how society should get over its uptight wokeness and let them use any word they want whenever they want, and that's the hill they choose to die on, then how about they go all in, and try convincing society to re-signify the n-word by using it IN ALL UPPER CASE as the name of a hard-to-use paint program with an overly complex incomprehensible user interface for TempleOS, then come back to me after a few years and let me know how well that went.

Prejudice by Tim Minchin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw

At least the Blender developers finally listened to reason, admitted they made a mistake, and switched the left and right mouse button behavior, which wasn't nearly as offensive to as many people as "GIMP", whose name makes it kind of hard to evangelize around the school or office without coming off like a flaming MAGA asshole.

Donald Trump appears to mock a reporter's disability:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdLfkhxIH5Q

By stubbornly refusing to change the name, the Gimp developers have lost the right to whine and feel sorry for themselves about how unpopular it is and how nobody takes them seriously. Because in the intervening 25 years since 1998, 4chan and GamerGate and MAGA and Q-Anon and January 6 and Elon Musk have kind of spoiled the coolness and originality of that rebellious "edgelord" attitude.

If you have to explain to people, "I'm not really ableist, but I am simply participating in performance art to resignify a derogatory slang term for handicapped people or submissive S&M sex slaves as the name of a paint program!" you have already lost them.