So you're at a geek party. You know, one where it's OK to talk shop and not feel like you're going to be banished by a crowd that just wants to dance to The Breakfast Club soundtrack and swap business cards. Inevitably, the conversation turns to Open Source. For the first half-hour, you're chatting away about Linux, the Free Software Foundation, Mozilla.org, and the coming utopia of a Microsoft-free world. You're blabbing away happily when a woman who's been standing by the rattan chair and eavesdropping says, "Yeah, operating systems and text editors and browsers are great, but what about software that's actually useful?"
And so the conversation turns to the GIMP, as it always does, because the GIMP is the only complete user-level Open Source application that's at all comparable with successful commercial applications.
The GIMP, short for GNU (not Unix) image manipulation program, is generally considered to be the first and most successful end-user productivity application produced by the Open Source movement. Simply put, it's a free Photoshop 3.0 clone for any Unix-like operating system.
The GIMP also happens to have a classic Open Source story. Two undergrads become obsessed with a class project and keep working on it even after the class ends. They release it to the world under the GNU Public License. Programmers around the world - impressed and surprised by the quantity and quality of the code - jump on the bandwagon and start fixing bugs, adding features, and improving performance. The GIMP becomes a movement unto itself, so much so that it continues to evolve even after the original authors move on to other projects.
Or so the myth goes. But the reality is close enough: Started in 1995 by Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball as a University of California at Berkeley class project, the GIMP became their obsession for the next three years while they learned about image processing and how to code a giant app. It spent a very long time in version 0.99 and was only released as 1.0 after they had already moved on to real jobs, leaving the GIMP as their legacy to the Net. Since then, it's been improved upon and tweaked by hundreds of people.
What can you do with the GIMP? Well, the nicest thing about being a faithful Photoshop clone is that, with the exception of some color handling and prepress color support, it does pretty much everything Photoshop does, in pretty much the same way. Try downloading GIMP and open it to take a look. Pretty familiar, eh? Just compare the toolboxes to get an idea:
