GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) has been born for 27 years. November 21, 1995GIMP’s first public releasewhen its full name was General The Image Manipulation Program was developed as a mid- to long-term development project of the eXperimental Computing Facility at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1996, RMS visited Berkeley, and the GIMP author asked him if he could change General to GNU. Under the license of RMS, the full name of GIMP was changed to “GNU Image Manipulation Program” (GNU image processing program), which also means that GIMP has become a part of the GNU project.

When GIMP was first born, it was just a simple image editor. Now, GIMP has almost all the functions required for image processing. Known as Photoshop under Linux, it can be said that it is recognized as the leading open source alternative to Photoshop.

To celebrate GIMP’s 27th birthday, Aryeom (director of the free and open-source film ZeMarmot) used GIMP to create this beautiful illustration:

GTK, which was born because of GIMP, has become the basis of many Linux desktop environment projects (such as GNOME and Xfce), GTK (GIMP Toolkit) is a set of graphics toolkits across multiple platforms, originally written for GIMP, GTK later It developed into a mainstream development tool for developing graphical interface applications under Linux, and evolved into a self-contained project, used by thousands of developers.

GIMP got more enthusiastic contributors than expected, and also attracted a developer from Hollywood who wrote what would become the new image processing engine GEGL The rudiment of , and now there are many software projects in use.

At present, the GIMP team is still actively developing GIMP 3.0, but at the same time, it also expressed that there is a large demand for funds. If people want to give back to GIMP, funding is a great way for them to do that, and it’s part of making sure GIMP is sustainable.