Honestly, yeah. I know on HN we’re all used to it and over it, but the general population is not.

Like, you can claim the weird name is a celebration of how anti-corporate and unfettered the team is, but whenever I try tell people about it for the first time, it’s super distracting and adds a lot of unnecessary friction. It always goes like this:

“Photoshop licenses are so expensive, I wish there was something cheaper since many of our team members don’t need all the features.”

“Have you tried GIMP? Now hold on, I know the—“

“I’m sorry, tried what?!”

“It’s got a weird name, but a lot of people find it a really good replacement for—“

“Wait, is it named after that BDSM guy from Pulp Fiction?”

“Well it’s an acronym… (sigh) but also, yes. But it’s really solid software people have been—“

“Why on Earth would you name a product after that guy?”

I think tools like git get past this issue by being so aggressively useful and now ubiquitous, but in the early stages of a project if you don’t have the massive adoption git had (which led to a positive feedback loop of more feature development leading to more users) then you can end up dragging your name like an albatross around your neck.

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wvbdmp 4 days ago | parent [-]

Honestly I find Blender much more offensive as a term, considering it actually comes up in daily life. I never hear anyone say “gimp”. But in context, neither usually bring up the wrong association for me…

In general I think naming is a vastly overblown issue. If bike shedders had their way, we would never have names as nondescript as Apple or Amazon, or as obscure as Google, yet they are wildly, unreasonably successful.

Gimp’s adoption problem lies elsewhere.

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pabs3 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Never heard any of these meanings of "blender", which one comes up for you?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blender

	▲	wvbdmp 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry lol, it’s apparently a strictly German expression meaning someone who’s all show and no substance. It was late and I got confused there for a second. Anyway, the point on Gimp stands. Although to be fair, a rebrand would hardly do any damage given how deeply unpopular it already is.

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Uehreka 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So in American English, the term “gimped” refers to someone who has a physical disability, usually affecting the way they walk. This term has largely fallen out of fashion though and isn’t used much anymore unless someone is very deliberately trying to be edgy.

Nowadays in America, if someone over the age of 30 (and many people under the age of 30) hear the word “gimp” or more specifically “the gimp”, their mind immediately flashes back to this scene from the incredibly popular movie Pulp Fiction (this clip is not safe for work and depicts sexual assault) https://youtu.be/PcZUjEWFpKs

If you check the first paragraph of the History section of GIMP’s Wikipedia page, you can see that this is not a coincidence, the creators did in fact name it after the character from that clip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP

So no, I don’t think this is an issue of “any interesting name being too controversial”. There are many places you could draw the line before getting to “let’s name our software after the Gimp from Pulp Fiction”.

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Mistletoe 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think of the kitchen appliance, not sure where you are going here.