In the following year, Kimball and Mattis met with Richard Stallman of the GNU Project while he visited UC Berkeley and asked if they could change General in the application's name to GNU (the name of the operating system created by Stallman), and Stallman approved. The community began developing tutorials, artwork and shared better work-flows and techniques.

The editor was quickly adopted and a community of contributors formed. In 1996 was the initial public release of GIMP (0.54). The acronym was coined first, with the letter G being added to -IMP as a reference to 'the gimp' in the scene from the 1994 Pulp Fiction film. In 1995, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis began developing GIMP-originally named General Image Manipulation Program-as a semester-long project at the University of California, Berkeley for the eXperimental Computing Facility.

GIMP is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later license and is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. It is not designed to be used for drawing, though some artists and creators have used it in this way. GIMP ( / ɡ ɪ m p/ GHIMP GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks. Amharic, Arabic, Asturian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bosnian, Brazilian Portuguese, Breton, British English, Bulgarian, Burmese, Canadian English, Catalan, Central Kurdish, Chinese (China), Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dzongkha, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kabyle, Kannada, Kashubian, Kazakh, Khmer, Kinyarwanda, Kirghiz, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Low German, Macedonian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Occitan, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian (Cyrillic script), Serbian (Latin script), Sinhala, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Valencian, Vietnamese, Xhosa, Yiddish

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