Honest to gods, this conversation happened today, and it may have cost me a job opportunity. The customer was super impressed with my menu design and animation, and wanted to know who we got it from. When I said I did it, their face lit up! Too bad as soon as i said GIMP, they weren’t interested anymore. Has anyone else experienced this? What do you say in similar situations?
That’s the whole point though: FOSS software originally doesn’t want to compete. There’s no point in maximizing market share when you give away your software for free.
That’s why the devs call it Gimp, Freax, Gnu, Slackware or the Kool Desktop Environment. They’re hobbyist projects by nature, and got big because they’re useful, not due to marketing. And that’s what I love about them.
I wish more software (and products in general) were made and named like that.
Btw, Slackware is a reference to the Church of the SubGenius, which is quite anti-mainstream.
And the name was specifically chosen to keep people from taking the project too seriously.
Same with Freax, which was renamed to Linux by Ari Lemmke when he uploaded it, without consulting Linus Torwalds first.
I wouldn’t quite agree with this, though: in Stallman’s worldview, all software should be free and open-source.