The Glimpse project began on July 6, 2019, born from a long-simmering frustration: the GNU Image Manipulation Program's acronym, GIMP, is also a slur against disabled people and a common playground insult. For years, various community members had asked the GIMP project to consider a name change. The GIMP team's response was essentially: 'We've used this name for 20 years, it's widely known, and while the word can be offensive, that's not our intent.' End of discussion.

So Bobby Moss and a group of contributors decided to fork it. Glimpse would be GIMP, but with a professional name that wouldn't make people wince when suggesting it in corporate or educational settings. The project attracted genuine interest — there were real users who avoided GIMP specifically because of the name, and the idea of a 'corporate-safe' version had appeal.

But here's the thing about forking a massive, decades-old codebase just to change the name: it's a staggering amount of work for something that sounds simple. Every reference, every string, every build script needs updating. And you still need to keep up with upstream development. The Glimpse team released version 0.1 in November 2019 and version 0.2 in August 2020, but the contributor pool was always thin.

By May 2021, the project was effectively dead. Bobby Moss had left due to conflicts with his day job. The pandemic had scattered what few contributors remained. The Patreon was closed, the Twitter account deleted, and the website went dark. The GIMP project, with its decades of momentum and established contributor base, continued on unbothered. Glimpse proved that you can fork code easily, but you can't fork a community — especially when your primary value proposition is a name change.

Glimpse had virtually no lasting technical impact, but it did succeed in one thing: reigniting a conversation about naming in open source projects. The fork forced people to grapple with the tension between tradition and inclusivity, even if most concluded that a name change alone isn't worth the overhead of maintaining a separate fork.

The project also became a cautionary tale about the economics of 'superficial' forks. Changing a name sounds trivial, but maintaining compatibility with a fast-moving upstream while also rebranding is a full-time job that requires a community you don't yet have. It's often cited as an example of why contributing upstream (even on contentious issues) is almost always more effective than forking.