Seriously. Even a super generic name like "GPaint" would be a huge improvement. Some parts of the Free Software world are run by programmers and programmers only and it shows. It would benefit to listen to a marketing person every once in awhile.

To be fair, it's open source software that makes the maintainers of it $0 of profit. Its closer to a form of art than it is a product. It might just be they don't actually care to gain adoption or "win the market".

As someone who's written and released his own Free Software, I have to say, I at least definitely cared about getting users. Most of the fun is in your product actually being used, not just it being out there. I never did anything remotely as important as Gimp, but if someone had come along and offered some simple services like "Let me design a cool logo for your project" I'd have jumped at the chance. I can't imagine Gimp hasn't had similar opportunities.

If they want to charge consulting rates or if they want to get a job somewhere maintaining it full time, then adoption matters.

> It would benefit to listen to a marketing person every once in awhile.

At the moment I can only remember things getting worse because of marketing people. Same goes for most ux.

Gimp is challenged in the UX department as well. Getting a professional onboard would help with that a lot too.

> The name is horrible in every sense that matters to gaining adoption.

Being memorable and differentiating yourself is important to gaining adoption, The GIMP achieves this better than something generic like *paint. A rename may have it's merits, but it won't be automatically better.

I mean, the name is a meme in the Linux community.

Because of the correlation of "gimp" to "crippled".

The idea that people might be led to believe that it's a shitty editor.

The UX is shit, but for those who've masochistically gotten used to it, GIMP isn't half-bad.