Re: Proposal: DNS change irc.gnome.org becomes A record and irc.gimpnet.org starts getting phased out.

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Wed, 2013-05-08 at 10:53 -0700, Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote:

> Although, GIMP is an acronym I was not aware that connotation of gimp
> (as a non-English speaker I am not aware of many words either).

It's offensive enough that I can't easily talk about it in a work
context, which is unfortunate as I'm involved in digital publishing
standards.

Cross-culture work is often difficult.

> With due respect, I think it is a coincidence.  Bad coincidence.
Yes, GIMP was named after a character in a movie, by people whose first
language was not English and who didn't know it was pejorative.

[...]

> I think we can promote irc.gnome.org, but I do not think it is our call
> to remove any domain or subdomain associated with GIMP project.  Did you
> ask to GIMP folks what do they think?

It's up to the GNOME project to decide if a name is acceptable as part
of GNOME.

A term might sound perfectly acceptable in one environment and not
another (terms like "black" and "coloured", "oriental" and "asian",
"latino" and "spic" come to my mind as examples). Sometimes context
makes it OK, and for example I can talk about "the GIMP image editor" in
technical committee work, but I wouldn't wear a GIMP tee-shirt (even
though I have one) at a business event where an InkscapeL tee-shirt
might be just fine :-) But an international project doesn't have that
option as easily, because it's seen everywhere.

> Anyway, if you make the change, you should change irc.ca.gimp.org,
> irc.us.gimp.org and irc.au.gimp.org as well.

Yes. And, as you note, the change would take longer to happen in things
like xchat connect menus. But it won't happen if it's not started :)

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml