| It's not misinterpreted. Misinterpretation is an accident that happens when a good faith message can be reasonably interpreted in multiple ways, and the listener's choice is not the speaker's choice. A good faith message is one where the speaker deliberately removes all likely ambiguity they can foresee. When a bad faith message is "misinterpreted", it's because the speaker was not interested in communicating successfully in the first place. There exist two things: 1. A name which amuses the developers by honoring an uninteresting bit of historical trivia. 2. A name which contributes to the project's health and success by attracting new users. One of these things must be selected as more important than the other. As far as whether GIMP, in and of itself, succeeds or fails, pretty much no one cares. If GIMP vanished, and the practical value lost to the world was big enough, some new project would spring up to take its place. Maybe Krita would expand its scope. The Blender team sure has bank to play with. Whatever. But what lots of people do care about is the success of open source in general. When software is expensive and closed, fewer people get to use it, and the fewest of them are screwed if what they need is too niche. When software is free and open, more people get to use it, niches become less niche, and niches that remain niche can be filled by anyone with enough DIY motivation. And because all of the benefits of open source rely on a large user community, attracting users is very important, both to individual projects and the whole community. And right now, the solution the open source community has to offer the world is an embarrassment. This is bad. The GIMP project is selfishly pissing in the water supply the entire open source community is trying to build. No one is going to take that trivially. |