Interview with Øyvind Kolås, GIMP developer (2017)

https://www.gimp.org/news/2026/02/22/%C3%B8yvind-kol%C3%A5s-interview-ww2017/

by ibobev • 5 months ago

140 77 5 months ago

Aldipower2• 5 months ago

What a mindset. Deep respect!

"And it turns out there are a couple hundred people already who would like me to continue writing code and sharing it publicly and openly. That at least sustains me roughly on the level of unemployment benefits in European countries. And I hope that this will even slightly increase – I will not have a Silicon Valley level software developer salary, but I’ll have enough money to cover my expenses."

layer8• 5 months ago

Username checks out. ;)

yanhangyhy• 5 months ago

That’s a cool name..

Aldipower2• 5 months ago

Kamelåså? Ah, Kamelåså!

nextstepfan• 5 months ago

You just bought 1000 litres of milk!

pezezin• 5 months ago

Syggelekokle?

nanis2• 5 months ago

2026-02-22 by GIMP Team

I am confused

This interview took place on February 4th, 2017

ReluctantLaser2• 5 months ago

No need to be confused, the opening paragraphs explain the discrepancy

nanis2• 5 months ago

Unfortunately, the rest of the interviews from that event have never seen the light of day - until now!

Not really -- It invites speculation as to why they were not published for 9 years. And, are the words spoken a decade ago still valid?

jrm48• 5 months ago

[flagged]

as1mov2• 5 months ago

If the dev team had a nickel for every time someone complained about the name, there would have enough money by now to fund the development of a UI revamp.

Now if they had a nickel for everytime someone complained about the bad UI...

InsideOutSanta2• 5 months ago

But do they want to do a full UI revamp? My impression is that a lot of people in the gimp ecosystem are happy to be aggressively unwelcoming to a broader audience. They don't see the name or the poor ux as a bug, but as a feature, and actively attack people who want to fix these issue. They call then "snowflakes" and "SJWs" and are gleeful when they fail to make any kinds of improvements.

Some of these people can be found in this very thread.

The problem with gimp is not one of budgets, it's that many of the people involved in gimp see its current state as how things should be.

jrm48• 5 months ago

Audacity makes me think that UI isn't the real problem.

lynndotpy6• 5 months ago

It's my experience that every professional and educational setting I've tried to use the GIMP in has seen the name as a roadblock and had it swiftly rejected.

It's really a shame they were steadfast in that one baffling decision. It was so self-destructive to the project. I wonder what would have happened if they stayed with their original name IMP, or found a different Pulp Fiction reference to make.

raverbashing• 5 months ago

You live in a society, and as a result you have to do a little bit of homework on names, and what they mean, and how they are percieved by the outside world.

Amem

If there's one point where OSS stands like a sore thumb (derogatory) is in everything that makes it welcoming to general users

Usability. Focus. Heck, even this strawberry of a low hanging fruit like the name cannot be solved by a nerd committee apparently.

Then honestly you can't complain when people don't use your sw

aleph_minus_one• 5 months ago

If there's one point where OSS stands like a sore thumb (derogatory) is in everything that makes it welcoming to general users

Depending on the circle (including lots of circles of "general users") annoying people who are obsessed about whether something could offend snowflakes is seen as welcoming.

II2II• 5 months ago

I grew up as a native English speaker in an English country, and had to look up what gimp means. Should the name be changed? Yes. On the other hand, I have never encountered the word outside of the context of the image editing program. That is unusual, even for an offensive term. It leaves me with the feeling that someone dug up an obscure piece of slang in order to paint the project in a negative light. (I've been using open source for long enough to know that painting open source in a negative light was a thing. For example: it used to be common to paint supporters of open source as Communist, which is treasonous in some circles.)

DonHopkins5• 5 months ago

The reason you've never encountered it outside of the image editing program is the same reason you don't encounter the n-word in public. It's prima facie offensive, so people don't use it unless they're trying to be assholes.

That's why to most people you end up looking like an asshole when you suggest they try GIMP. Then you have to apologize and agree that it's a terrible name, but a great image editing program. But the damage is already done.

It's as simple as that, just like as if it were named after the n-word. What else would you expect?

The g-word is arguably just as bad as the n-word, and it's not the sexual connotation, it's the fact that it viciously punches down making fun of disabled people.

And people who act that way and use those words on purpose are assholes.

Donald Trump mocks a reporter's disability:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdLfkhxIH5Q

ChocolateGod• 5 months ago

Words have different meanings in different languages and regions, also words themselves change meaning over time.

I've seen GIMP deployed in British schools with no issues. We should all start being adults and stop fussing because some pixels on our screen might spell out a word that in a certain context and certain part of the world might be seen as offensive

lynndotpy6• 5 months ago

What is the name for this fallacy, "We should all start being adults"? Everyone who is an adult can understand that names matter, especially ones intentionally chosen to cause offense or a ruckus.

First, it doesn't matter how much you or I or the commentator above us changes to "be adults". Only the saddest and most lonesome people will be the sole decisionmaker in every context they exist in.

Sometimes, you exist in a context where you need someone elses permission to use software. This is often the case for employed people.

Second, other adults will disagree with you. It doesn't make them any less "adults".

On the other hand, someone would not be unreasonable to consider you childish if you're so stuck up on your software opinions that you'll disparage everyone around you in the defense of your obscure preferred image editing program. Could you imagine implying to a room of peers that you're the only adult?

It's wonderful for you that GIMP's name has never been a problem for you. But there are about 8 billion people who are not you, and a few dozen of them are fellow GIMP users.

I've been using GIMP for most of its existence but I've faced difficulties trying to use it in school and work. Where I live, "gimp" is a word which means either a slur for someone with a motor disability or as a form-fitting leather sex torture-fetish full-body garment.

(For what it's worth, the G was added in order to reference the form-fitting leather sex torture-fetish full-body garment in Pulp Fiction. The program was called 'IMP' beforehand.)

jrm48• 5 months ago

Yes, every time I post this point, I get this sort of "but I'm not offended" response.

I'm not either, personally. But I live in America, a pretty strong force, for better or lately probably worse. And GIMP is very good software, but the name makes it hard to recommend or take seriously. Not even in terms of "I'm offended" but in terms of "if you thought this software was good why would you name it something like that?"

GIMP perhaps could have competed with Adobe stuff, but we will never know because this name doesn't make it out the door for a number of related reasons. Don't shoot me on this fact, I'm just the messenger.

mikolajw4• 5 months ago

how they are percieved by the outside world

The vast majority of the outside world does not perceive the name the way you do. Even the majority of English users doesn't, as most of them learned standard English as second language at school without being taught vulgar Anglo-American slang.

If you want to pursue linguistic sensitivity, the just direction is against anglophone domination, even if impractical. We should be taking power away from the most powerful and redistributing it back to the weak, not the other way around.

So, it is the anglophones who should stop calling people using a nasty word instead of expecting international, multilingual communities to adapt to their culture.

jrm48• 5 months ago

Let me be clear, this has nothing to do with pushing "linguistic sensitivity" for its own sake. Nothing.

Look, the author himself wondered out loud why he wasn't more deservedly popular. I put forth a reason why. PR is real. I understand if you really want to keep the name at the possible cost of popularity; but I don't think it's worth it. I wonder if he understood the possible tradeoff.

tokai• 5 months ago

Green Is My Pepper is a great name.

VimEscapeArtist• 5 months ago

Maybe it's the GIMP developer who should be interviewing someone who can build a decent UI and actually understands UX.

cmyk_student6• 5 months ago

We do now have a UX repo to ask for user UX/UI reports and feedback - anyone can contribute, no coding required: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/GIMP/Design/gimp-ux/-/issues

Our release posts now regularly feature a UX/UI section where we highlight the work being done. We've implemented a lot of low-hanging fruit and localized fixes, while we continue to grow our design volunteer group and build larger designs.

sinnickal• 5 months ago

GimpKrita would be perfect

addend• 5 months ago

On my Windows PC it takes GIMP 15 seconds to start and get into a state where I can edit. It loads palettes, initializes and what not, according to the splash screen text. That's too slow, so I never use it for quick image edits like crop, scale or color changes. But that in turn has the effect that I never learn the unusual UI. Which means that for more complex task I avoid it too. Other zero cost tools like the web based Photopea loads super fast and mimics the UI of leading image editing suites. It thus beats GIMP on both quick and easy tasks and more complex tasks.

jdboyd• 5 months ago

If it started faster, you still probably would find it a bit unwieldy for crop scale and simple color changes. I wish it did those things better, but on the other hand it seems like it would be appropriate to have a simpler program for quick tasks as well.

And I say this as somebody who rather likes the gimp.

pinkmuffinere2• 5 months ago

I love gimp, it is the only “heavyweight” image editor I ever learned to use, and that choice has saved me so much money in software subscriptions! Thankyou maintainers!

hungryhobbit• 5 months ago

I love the contrast between this and one of the next comments:

In my honest opinion, GIMP is a horrific piece of software.

Both are absolutely true!

GIMP has been, for many years, the best free graphics software available. At the same time, it's so horribly anti-user (and anti-usability) that if it wasn't free software, the company behind it would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.

tadfisher• 5 months ago

"Anti-user' and "anti-usability" are far too harsh. Outdated, yes. A product of 1990s-era UX design, absolutely. But every changelog has some mention of a UX improvement, and actually using the product at version 3.0 is, dare I say, pretty enjoyable once you unlearn things and pretend it's Photoshop 6.0. Single-window mode by default helps a ton.

I have used far worse software from commercial outfits. You would not believe how much aerospace and specialized CAD stuff still uses Motif and doesn't support scroll wheels or extra mouse buttons.

goodmythical• 5 months ago

I think that the weakness doesn't lie within GIMP itself.

Imagine that you are a car hobbyist. You know your way around a wrench.

But then you step in to an F1 garage or even your local repair shop run by that one guy who inheritted his father's shop in the 50s and has thrown a tool away since the Reagan administration.

It's going to be possible for you to do everything that you know how to do, and even to learn some things along the way, but you're not going to be anywhere near as efficient as you were in your garage where the only tools you have are the ones you regularly use and you know the locations (perhaps roughly) of everything.

The same could be applied across any number of domains. Knowing your way around and ambulance isn't going to go as far as you might think it would in a surgical suite.

Knowing some python isn't going to get your pulls accepted in Canonical, Debian, etc.

Knowing your professors preffered citation methodology isn't going to gaurantee academically succesful searching of The Library of Congress or even the New York Public Library.

etc etc etc

GIMP represents nearly the totality of knowledge relating to image manipulation, and you can lay it out to perfectly match your personal knowledge and workflow, but it simply is not possible to have it automatically laid out to perfectly match everyone's workflow.

Could it be more intuitive? Perhaps, but moving things around now is liable to break the workflows of tens of thousands who have learned to use and love GIMP the way that it currently is.

For instance, having only ever used GIMP as my primary image manipulation tool, I can and do have some of the same complaints against [insert other software] that people routinely level against GIMP. The last time I tried to use Photoshop I spent more time in tutorials and help pages than doing actual image editting because Photoshop is as unfamiliar to me as GIMP is to a Photoshop user.

jaapz• 5 months ago

I'm not entirely sure how much "horrible UX" is correlated with companies going bankrupt. Amazon (the shop), AWS, Windows...

lm28469• 5 months ago

You can always pirate Adobe prod cts, it is always morally correct

pinkmuffinere2• 5 months ago

Funnily, I’ve never even been tempted. I think that’s another endorsement of gimp

richard_chase• 5 months ago

In my honest opinion, GIMP is a horrific piece of software.

senko• 5 months ago

Most of the comments here talk about the GIMP UX. Fair point, but misses the article entirely.

[Øyvind] is the maintainer of GEGL and babl, the color engines of GIMP. His work was instrumental in (among many other things) the long-waited non-destructive filters implemented in GIMP 3.0

The interview is about Pippin's background (fine arts) and current (as of the time of the interview) work, and in some details about the graphics engine underneath GIMP (GEGL).

FWIW, it doesn't touch on the UI/UX side at all. So even you Photoshop lovers may find it interesting :)

iamnothere• 5 months ago

I don’t often do much with image editing, so GIMP has been perfectly adequate for me for decades. I’ve never rented a copy of Photoshop and don’t care about it.

I’ve noticed small but consistent improvements over the years. People who complain about the UX should just go use Photoshop. It’s fine. Layers work well, retouching and filters are easy. I don’t really understand the complaints.

I’m very glad GIMP exists, and I hope it continues to make FOSS haters cope and seethe for the next 50 years. Keep whining about the name please!

lynndotpy6• 5 months ago

The people who want GIMP to change its name are the people who use GIMP, love GIMP, and have difficulties using GIMP in contexts like education or employment because of its name. It's a simple fact that the name "GIMP" caused problems. It's a shame.

But there's not much use in changing the name now, you can't get that lost time back. GIMP isn't the only FOSS image editor available anymore. There are myriad of Photoshop competitors in the subscription, freeware, and FOSS spaces.

I love GIMP and I'm still using it because I've got decades of muscle memory. But I also love Krita and if I need to edit something on a work computer, I'll just use that.

DonHopkins5• 5 months ago

People who hate GIMP's name are not "FOSS haters". They just hate it when certain people in the FOSS community make the entire FOSS community look bad.

Here is a typical attempt to justify the name "GIMP", demanding that society change instead of admitting the name has obviously terrible meanings:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38236618

_c3ag>first thing that pops is a phrase of some biologist regards why evolution made plants green and not blue (physically, blue can absorb way more energy from the sun)... SPOILER: because makes the plantae organisms way more stable rather than performant (which opens up less windows for failings regards evolution). i use Gimp for digital collages, dead simple pixel-art and even composing a poem book for my beloved one! and that tool if it isn't perfect for the job, is probably about adjusting expectations ¶ why society can't re-signify a offensive word?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38237328

DonHopkins on Nov 12, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?

Sorry, but the number of people who have seen Pulp Fiction, plus the number of people who know derogatory terms for disabled people, is much greater than the number of people who know technical biological terms of art.

If the GIMP developers really want to score an edgy rhetorical point about how society should get over its uptight wokeness and let them use any word they want whenever they want, and that's the hill they choose to die on, then how about they go all in, and try convincing society to re-signify the n-word by using it IN ALL UPPER CASE as the name of a hard-to-use paint program with an overly complex incomprehensible user interface for TempleOS, then come back to me after a few years and let me know how well that went.

Prejudice by Tim Minchin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw

At least the Blender developers finally listened to reason, admitted they made a mistake, and switched the left and right mouse button behavior, which wasn't nearly as offensive to as many people as "GIMP", whose name makes it kind of hard to evangelize around the school or office without coming off like a flaming MAGA asshole.

Donald Trump appears to mock a reporter's disability:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdLfkhxIH5Q

By stubbornly refusing to change the name, the Gimp developers have lost the right to whine and feel sorry for themselves about how unpopular it is and how nobody takes them seriously. Because in the intervening 25 years since 1998, 4chan and GamerGate and MAGA and Q-Anon and January 6 and Elon Musk have kind of spoiled the coolness and originality of that rebellious "edgelord" attitude.

If you have to explain to people, "I'm not really ableist, but I am simply participating in performance art to resignify a derogatory slang term for handicapped people or submissive S&M sex slaves as the name of a paint program!" you have already lost them.

smallstepforman• 5 months ago

I must be the only GIMP user that has never complained about the UX. But I have never used Photoshop so I’m not fighting muscle memory.

lynndotpy6• 5 months ago

I think it might be muscle memory. I started using GIMP in 2005 or so before the single window mode, and my muscle memory is tailor-fit to it. It felt like an extension of myself.

With GIMP 3, there are a lot of improvements! But it also breaks my muscle memory a lot. GIMP 3 is objectively better, but I find myself opening 2.10 regularly.

tsumnia• 5 months ago

I started with GIMP and still pull it up first before worrying about Photoshop. For me, the "fighting muscle memory" comes from "huh, GIMP does it like this..."

_s_a_m_• 5 months ago

How do you wanna complain if you dont know anything else?

wileydragonfly• 5 months ago

I like GIMP and I’ve unlearned a lot of my photoshop muscle memory but the name is a huge problem and I have to say “yes, I know, the name is unfortunate” every single time I introduce it to someone new. I’ll carry this burden because it’s free software but it is so annoying.

coolThingsFirst• 5 months ago

Did you guys notice something?

This is from 2017 and it’s a throwback there no longer are such articles, now it’s all about AI.

Koshkin• 5 months ago

I see a huge problem with Latin alphabet (with or without modifications) being shared among different languages is that it is almost never transliterated from one such language to another (I think the Baltic and the Slavs may still be doing that), which can make foreign names look like something imagined by a low-key LLM. How am I supposed to say 'Andrzei Chrząszcz' or, for an easier one, say, 'Buôn Ma Thuột.'

Interview with Øyvind Kolås, GIMP developer (2017)

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