As someone who likes to think that I do have as many "commits/participation" as many others, I would appreciate it if people would focus on the core argument:
It is hard to get people to use this software, who would otherwise benefit, because of their perception of the name, and it's easier to change the name once than change those perceptions every single time.
If you have problems with THAT, I'd love to discuss them, but please leave "SJWism" and whatever out of it - that's not really what's at issue here.
> As someone who likes to think that I do have as many "commits/participation" as many others, I would appreciate it if people would focus on the core argument
The reason this is important is because in recent times essentially nobodies like to pop out of the woodwork with "ideas" like this. They then like to "shame" people who don't agree with them. There's nothing wrong with expecting people to build up a reputation before suggesting divisive and controversial ideas.
It's not a "crusade" in any sense. It's one issue on a GitLab that someone decided to link over here (not one of the people who made the issue, I think). It is about "political correctness" only in that it's genuinely hard to get some people to even consider using this free software because, and ONLY because, of its name.
I think you should rethink your idea of a crusade if you think this is what that word means.
This is hardly an isolated event, it's not just a single issue on a single project.
> It is about "political correctness" only in that it's genuinely hard to get some people to even consider using this free software because, and ONLY because, of its name.
People that vain will find something else to dislike about it.
Where did I say anything about a conspiracy or someone trying to destroy open source?
The crusade is to shame people into not using language that a minority of the world deems inappropriate, it's not confined to open source. It's definitely not a conspiracy, the people that push things like this onto other people are obnoxiously open and loud about it.
As someone who participated in this issue, I want to let you know that we chose to engage the current maintainers before forking because that's the nice, respectful thing to do. I, personally, find it extremely aggravating when people fork projects over minor decisions like this. It leads to a huge amount of wasted effort on both sides.
As it is, we're likely to either fork the project (which is underway at the moment), or build a GIMP keybinding compatibility layer for Krita; the second is less preferable because it would require quite a lot of hacking to make the more advanced features work, and would almost certainly not reach 100% parity.
As you note, either one will be a good deal of effort; another reason we wanted to at least ask the maintainers if they would be willing to accept a patch with the name change, instead.
Now what was your point, other than to insult some people whose argument you almost certainly didn't read?
I actually did read the thread thank you very much. My point is people want to bitch about a trivial thing (yes it is my opinion that this is a trivial matter.) How much effort and time are you willing to spend on such a minor thing as a 4 character string? I predict someone will fork it, and in a year's time it'll be abandoned and not kept up to date because they'll simply move onto the next trivial matter which offends you folks.
Frankly, few will use your fork anyway because it provides zero value vs the established name/brand.
So, you read the issue. What is it you fail to grasp about the conversation "I think, rather than buying Photoshop, you should use this software." "We can't use software with a name like that."
That's a conversation I've had, in real life, with a professor and a professional photographer.
Literally, the only thing holding them back was the name.
Let's be real here. You can't even make a circle in GIMP without jumping through various hoops. Right now, the hurdle for those professionals is just the name, but wait until you see when they actually try using the tools. They'll happily pay for Photoshop once they realize that what they wanted after all was just a free Photoshop. This is quite a different angle I am arguing from, but it's my pragmatic side. I believe GIMP should maintain it's current userbase that was earned through over 20 years of hard work under their current name, instead of chasing customers that will unlikely appreciate their project anyway.
This. I’ve used Photoshop since v4. Every time I try to use the latest version of GIMP I run away and happily pay for Photoshop because I choose not spend time to learn how to use GIMP (or Pixelmator on Mac.)
"I don’t like the name GIMP. Will you change it?
With all due respect, no.
We’ve been using the name GIMP for more than 20 years and it’s widely known.
The name was originally (and remains) an acronym; although the word “gimp” can be used offensively in some cultures, that is not our intent.
On top of that, we feel that in the long run, sterilization of language will do more harm than good. GIMP has been quite popular for a long time in search engine results compared to the use of the word “gimp”. So we think we are on the right track to make a positive change and make “gimp” something people actually feel good about. Especially if we add all the features we’ve been meaning to implement and fix the user interface.
Finally, if you still have strong feelings about the name “GIMP”, you should feel free to promote the use of the long form GNU Image Manipulation Program or maintain your own releases of the software under a different name."
So instead of using the name "GIMP" with your easily-offended professor and photographer, use the name "GNU Image Manipulation Program" and move on with your life. Or let them spend their hard earned cash propping up Adobe's stock price. In the end, the developers of GIMP, built it for themselves. If others don't like the app for whatever reason, name included - there are plenty of other alternatives.
> destroying over 20 years of work to make their name.
Oh right. I forgot filing an issue presenting a calm and reasoned argument for changing one string of text to another was the same as "destroying" a project.
Snark is not acceptable on HN. And yes, making an established project change their name is destroying everything they had done for it under that name. They will have to start over from scratch and it will take years to reach the same level of name recognition.
I didn't check the timestamps of all your comments so maybe it isn't your last comment. I'll let others here read through your comments (as I definitely did) and see if you made a snarky comment before lecturing others on snark. It might not be fair: snark is in the eye of the beholder, right? Oops, now I'm being snarky.
> Wonder how many people who are up in arms about the name actually use GIMP?
I, for one, use it every day. Have you taken a look at the discussion? Your questions are pretty thoroughly addressed, which, along with your final line here, make me think you're more interested in your desire to use ableist slurs and the holy right of software maintainers to ignore any and all criticism without consequences than anything else.
Let us be clear: Nobody in this issue thread cares _at all_ about whether it was "meant" to convey the same meaning as the word "gimp". It is factually true that people find it awkward to recommend in professional settings because of its name, and sometimes the name makes adoption impossible.
Obviously nobody can force the maintainers to do anything, but we can _ask_ them to change a superficial component of their excellent software to make it much more useful, which is what this issue was.
For the vast majority of the non-English world, the acronym for a project called "C UNIX Networking Toolkit" doesn't mean anything but the project's name. That doesn't mean going around using that acronym is a good idea.
Have you considered that your example might be a really good idea? The same idea has been used as a highly effective tourism campaign: https://mashable.com/2016/11/06/cu-in-the-nt/
So, great! We've agreed that there _is_ a line, right? A line after which a word is too offensive to too many people to use as a project name; a line over which it's sensible for your users to reasonably and respectfully ask you to change the name, and expect more than a "No. Closed." in response? And your argument is, GIMP doesn't go over that line?
Well yes, for me in California and much of the non-English speaking world, before this "issue" was brought up had no idea what "gimp" was. If anything, the pro-change side has done nothing except raise the awareness of the offensive term and we will likely see an increase in attacks using that term due to it.
I can't imagine changing the innocent name of my project because it happened to be a homophone of a mean word in some other language.
Except, you said you CAN imagine that. I just gave you an example of EXACTLY that and you agreed that it was too far. So, clearly, you have some kind of double standard here.
You're arguing in bad faith and it's making you look silly. Stop it.
Please don't cross into flamewar like this, regardless of how wrong or annoying other comments are. I realize that it's hard when you're arguing against a whole bunch of people—it can feel like you're surrounded by a mob. But situations like that make it more important, not less, to follow the site guidelines.
I most certainly am not arguing in bad faith. The last sentence is an utterance of my own personal feeling about things. But objectively I could see why the name of the other project you mentioned would be an issue. Regrettably, that term is a lot more well known and widely used and I accept why they would change it. I did not say I agreed with it and I especially do not here with GIMP. I am not able to morally justify forcing them to change their project name, since I really do not think of GIMP as anything other than the image editing program I've always used, like the vast majority of the world. I'm sorry that you and various regions of the U.S. are inflicted with such a slur to begin with.
Sure, but you want them to do it right and are willing to fight for it right? If they end up having to do it due to those pressures, that is very much having their hand forced.
Do you also take offense on the word GNOME? which the dictionary defines as "a small ugly person".
How about DALCOP? Which means a particularly stupid person.
Apple
(North America) an American Indian (Native American) who is "red on the outside, white on the inside". Used primarily by other American Indians to indicate someone who has lost touch with their cultural identity. First used in the 1970s.
No, the dictionary defines a gnome as "a legendary dwarfish creature supposed to guard the earth's treasures underground". You're using a variant definition. Gnomes as commonly understood are mythical (i.e. not real) creatures. I've never heard anyone be offended by "GNOME". You can't just make up offensiveness where none actually exists.
Contrast with the word "midget", which does refer to real people and is offensive, and would be a bad name for a software project. Same for "gimp".
I am not a native English speaker. I know the insulting meaning of "cunt" but not "gimp". I think this is the case for most people around me. That's the difference. You are trying to mix two different levels. I am not defending "GIMP is a fine name" since my English is not good enough. My reply just provides an evidence that your example might not be very appropriate here.
Totally! I agree that they're on different levels of international recognition. My point here is that siphon refuses to agree that they're even the same _kind_ of thing, which makes me think they're not interested in actually reaching a good compromise, for some reason, but just want to be right.
I couldn't even remember the offensive definition when I read the title. I only associate the name with the program. Language can mean whatever we want it to, and by admission that it's offensive, you make it offensive. Should a definition change in the future that makes "hacker" a negative word, should this social platform change their name? Or could we simply say that it has a different definition to us? Is changing the name of a product really just superficial, if the name is the primary way people recognize it is safe to use?
As I say in my general post on the topic, IPNS is not meant for human use - DNS can be adapted to point to IPNS names just as easily as to point to IP addresses.
If we compare hash content with http urls, urls are easy to remember, while hash are hard to remember?
It feels like the dark ages before altavista, and you had to know the url. Still, a url was more memorable to pass friends by email, than a hash.
Will there be ipfs search engines and wouldn't that just be bittorrent?
Also browsers remember urls... If everything goes through your local gateway, it's all just /hash, hard to remember / re-discover? Or is the plan also to move away from browsers?
DNS works just fine for IPNS content-hash-addresses too, and heck, you can do that right now. You just use that, the same way you'd use anything else - just say that dweb.foo.xyz is associated with a particular IPNS address (and www.foo.xyz can be the regular ol' web address).
Cloudflare's business model is intrinsically threatened by the existence of a global, distributed, and (basically) commons-supported CDN, because that would make their point-served, centralized, relatively expensive CDN obsolete.
No, not really. IPFS is a storage platform. Cloudflare is fundamentally a compute platform (servers in hundreds of cities to which you can deploy arbitrary code and trust that it is executed faithfully). These two things are complementary, not competitive, which is why we decided it would be interesting to integrate with IPFS.
I understand that Cloudflare aspires to be primarily a compute platform. I think it’s a cool goal, and you have the technical chops to build it. But isn’t it fair to say today that Cloudflare is primarily a networking platform? We customers use you, overwhelmingly, to make our sites load faster, and pay less in the process. Not far behind comes anti-ddos protection - also a networking-centric feature. Everything else is aspirational.
I am aware of where you want to go - and the workers feature you’re working on, for example, is extremely cool. But realize that there is a huge gap between where you want to be as a business and a brand, and where you actually are.
IPFS may not compete with what you want to be - but it does compete with what you are. That’s because IPFS is not a storage platform, it’s a content distribution platform. And Cloudflare is in the content distribution business.
IPFS is not a storage platform - or if so, it's a temporary, short-term storage platform whose purpose it is to cache and deliver content - especially highly-requested content - to users. It can't be a long-term storage platform because there's no way to ensure that other people will store your content long-term!
I think Cloudflare could easily co-exist, selling premium IPFS hosting for companies who want highly available and performant content. Not to mention they do much more than static CDN.
You're implying that there's some ulterior-motive Embrace, Extend, Extinguish plan underlying this? Is there anything, however, in what they announced they will do that will have a negative effect, though?
Being a total noob I enjoyed the article (thanks OP) then went on to wonder how this works. So first I thought it was available through all of these gateways, but then I read something about pinning - do the gateways pin the content? Or the "hosting nodes" (forgive my lack of knowledge about the terminology)?
Two things about this. First, the blog is also available at https://leotindall.com/ where it is just a regular website. I think it's _really_ interesting that the first thing that comes to mind is Medium and not, you know... a regular website.
Second, public IPFS gateways aren't the intended way to use the network. It's meant to be built into browser software, so each user acts as a mirror of what they're currently reading. Latency is high because the gateway is run by a nonprofit and they don't pay for ultrafast hardware for the public gateway.
There are a couple of advantages to places like Medium, Facebook, or Quora over a normal website.
The first is branding -- you get what you expect from a site. FB for personal connections (memes or distraction for others), curated content for Medium & Quora, etc. I remember using the web back in the 90s or so. I had committed to memory a dozen sites or so that I would visit every day. Slashdot, Yahoo News, ScaryGoRound etc. It was a bit stressful. Now I can just go to Reddit and just get distracted by whatever. Even curating your own Reddit experience is difficult, like it was for RSS. Most viewers of Reddit don't really create an account.
The second is ease of use for publishers. I'm not going to set up a website, even a Wordpress blog now if I can just go post content on Reddit or Medium where I have a chance of people reading it.
For Medium, I get what I expect: Some annoying "we've seen you here before" banner covering up the whole page. That usually doesn't happen for personal web pages.
> Latency is high because the gateway is run by a nonprofit and they don't pay for ultrafast hardware for the public gateway.
Isn't ipfs.io run by Protocol Labs? And didn't they raise something like $250M from the Filecoin ICO? Surely they can afford some fast gateway servers.
As someone who likes to think that I do have as many "commits/participation" as many others, I would appreciate it if people would focus on the core argument:
It is hard to get people to use this software, who would otherwise benefit, because of their perception of the name, and it's easier to change the name once than change those perceptions every single time.
If you have problems with THAT, I'd love to discuss them, but please leave "SJWism" and whatever out of it - that's not really what's at issue here.