this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
-84 points (18.7% liked)
Technology
59534 readers
3195 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Honestly, this is such a dumb argument. The creators of The GIMP acknowledge that this is a reference to a BDSM kink popularized by Pulp Fiction. Leather bondage masks are probably the first thing most people think of when they hear the word "Gimp".
Yes, it is also a relatively obscure ableist term for someone with a visible physical disability, but this was never what the creators had in mind with the name. Pretty much nobody uses this term anymore.
Just let it be. If you oppose it for being ableist you're just pretending that the name is a reference to something offensive, when it's a well understood fact that it wasn't named after the ableist term. If you oppose it for what the creators named it after, you're basically just kink shaming, and I really don't care if the program is a reference to bondage sex.
Surprisingly people don't constantly rally against LAME, the MP3 media encoder, and liblame is a massively important library for audio processing used by just about every computer in existence. This was deliberately named after the ableist term, and the 'L' in "LAME" stands for "LAME", so they could have used literal any -AME name they wanted, and kept their stupid recursive abbreviation + ironic project name that was so popular at the time (LAME stands for "LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder").