Featured image credit: Rob McCowan on Pexels
It’s no secret that Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) doesn’t always have the best branding. This makes sense; smaller projects are often relatively informal, the audience is usually far more receptive to technical function over naming, and it’s just generally considered a low priority. If users download through a package manager in the terminal, they may never even see the project’s logo.
But there is a problem with this. Many, if not most Free Software evangelists want to see user-bases grow, for desktop Linux, LibreOffice, and the like to be taken seriously amongst the general public, rather than perhaps having a passing recognition amongst people whose close relatives work “with computers”. This is in direct competition with the above circumstances.
It’s no secret amongst those who know me (and who are likely to discuss FOSS in any capacity) that I cannot stand the name of GIMP. It is a decent if flawed image editor, and while not a true replacement for Photoshop for professionals, it is much more than good enough for the general public who want to do image editing above what the photo app on their phone or computer can do. People who perhaps know what “barrel distortion” means but don’t want to pay £871 for Photoshop Elements to remove it from their photos.
This has been a genuine problem. I have personally had recommendations to use GIMP for such things rejected – or outright mocked – by virtue of its name alone. The qualities (and flaws) of the software itself were rendered irrelevant – they never even loaded up the website. For context, I am British, and in the UK gimp refers to a sex slave (NSFW) or an increasingly insulting term for a disabled person. Describing something as “gimped” is increasingly frowned upon. Do not call a disabled person a gimp in the UK.
In short, it is not a word you use in a professional context. Yet, if GIMP developers want their software to be widely adopted, this is exactly what they are asking people to do.
It’s tempting in some quarters to say that this is political correctness gone mad, that the thought-sterilising language police have taken over – and if I remember correctly, this has been roughly the line the GIMP devs have taken, without necessarily the politically charged baggage that comes with it2. There’s a problem with this – now your Free Software project to build an image editor has included changing the English language in its scope.
I have seen responses that these aren’t users GIMP needs, that those who cannot accept the name are perhaps unworthy of using it. The problem is, if you want your user-base to include a substantial share of the real-life public, the people who turn to Photoshop not just as a brand name but as a verb, these are the people to whom you need to appeal to. My daughter’s cash-strapped nursery could use an image editor for their publicity, but I am certain what the reaction would be if I recommended GIMP3. I work for the NHS4 and have been in situations where a reasonable image editor would have made my work better – but can you imagine the Daily Mail5 headlines if that information got out?
ANGER AS NHS STAFF “USE INSULTING SLUR” FOR DISABLED PEOPLE
DAILY MAIL, PAGE 17, IN AN ALARMINGLY PLAUSIBLE FUTURE
So yeah. It didn’t happen6.
Obviously capitulating to the Mail is not something anybody particularly wants to do, but this goes beyond the user-base. The obvious comparison is Blender, which thanks to buckets of funding from industry (and a lot of hard work) has gone from the weird package newbies use because they can’t afford/pirate 3DS Max to the darling of indie game studios with use in flagship productions like The Man in the High Castle and household name superhero films7. Blender’s development fund page is a who’s who of blue-chip sponsors – Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Wacom, AMD, Google, Adobe, Meta, Valve, BMW. On the other hand, GIMP’s sponsorship page has Arm giving them a single Windows-on-ARM devkit. Purism gave them a laptop. This year, Wacom gave them two graphics tablet pens.
I don’t want to diminish the hard work of anybody. GIMP is a huge project, and for it to get as far as it has largely on single-member donations alone is incredible. It is an achievement. Make no mistake – this is not a hit piece saying that GIMP devs are bad or lazy or evil or whatever. I simply question some of their priorities. I say that because The Internet™ is where distinctions like that go to die.
It’s also entirely possible that the GIMP devs simply don’t want Intel coming to the party for philosophical reasons or breathing-down-their-neck reasons. I can understand that – but look at the differences between those two donor pages and genuinely parse that a daft, shock-humour, vaguely-insulting name isn’t at least part of the equation. If you’ve spent phone numbers on your corporate image over decades, do you really want to risk your PR on publicly getting into bed with a GIMP?
To their credit, I think the GIMP devs know this to some degree. Their proposed funding foundation was to be called the Wilber Foundation – named after the software’s mascot – but I can’t find any trace of it coming into existence as of 2026. DuckDuckGo offers two alternate spellings and links to a page for a children’s charity that’s otherwise entirely in Chinese.
The other stock answer here is simply to fork it. This is a common response but I think that it ignores that the majority of potential users for a product such as GIMP are not developers and quite likely don’t even know (or care) what FOSS is. They know it’s free-as-in-beer and that’s why they get it. Not only has it been done and withered on the vine, it doesn’t solve the above problems. Big donors will want to deal with the core development team rather than an individual with no strong connection to the project, and users will still have to google “gimp” on their work computer when it comes to looking up the manuals for their new software.
Another defence from the GIMP developers is that it’s been called this name for a long time and is well-known. I don’t mean to be blunt, but… is it? It’s very well-known in developer and FOSS circles but I strongly suspect that the fall-off outside of those, even in regions like photography, is sharp and strong. Remember, the users needed for broader adoption are not necessarily technical in the computing field; they might not even know what OS runs on their phone, as an example (“Is that app available for Samsung”, etc).
The world is screaming right now for a proper FOSS alternative to Photoshop. Nobody likes Adobe’s subscription model other than Adobe. Apps like Pixelmator, CorelDRAW, the (free) Affinity have tried to fill the gap, at least until the first two were bought by Apple and suddenly grew a subscription option respectively (Affinity requires a Canva account to download, and using a live service like that in what I do immediately raises questions about what you’re installing and what it can access). Krita has done well lately, but is still fundamentally an illustration program rather than a photo editor.
I really think that with a small course correction, GIMP could be the piece of that puzzle. Big money could bring in big development, modernise the plugin system, and despite the progress lately could do great things for a UX that can’t quite escape GNOME 2. I want GIMP to thrive! I want this to be something I can recommend to those in my work bubble but outside the developer bubble without people saying “Did you really say it’s called ‘gimp’?”
Right now that won’t happen. I guess I’ll just have to go work for Ann Summers (NSFW).
- At time of writing, and it only lasts three years. Adobe really want to get you into a recurring subscription! ↩︎
- The Internet™ tends to believe that personal beliefs are A) always extremely politically charged and B) come in bundles like satellite TV. ↩︎
- For completeness, I don’t think this is a problem that affects every piece of FOSS software. The similarly-named G.I.M.P.S. is unlikely to suffer from this because it will never need to appeal to the general public, apart from maybe a headline or so. If my daughter’s nursery starts needing to calculate Mersenne primes, I expect her counting ability to get much better. ↩︎
- England’s socialised healthcare system; Scotland, Wales, and NI have their own, separately managed but comparable systems.. ↩︎
- British tabloid newspaper. Editorially somewhere between FOX News, Breitbart, TMZ, and Xibalba, Architect of Nightmares. ↩︎
- For clarity, this wasn’t a decision of my management or anybody else; it didn’t get that far. ↩︎
- It’s also still a bit of the weird package newbies use. I say that with love. ↩︎