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Starting with this tutorial we begin our discussion about the GIMP. In this tutorial we are going to discuss some of the fundamental aspects of GIMP, what makes it unique, and then we're going to get into ways that you can use the GIMP and why you want to use the GIMP anyway. So, let's go ahead and start and talk about the nature of GIMP. The first thing we want to do is we want to establish what GIMP is actually about. The GIMP is a raster based image editing tool, now what this means is it's going to allow us to edit digital images as well as create them. Now there are a lot of other raster based image editing tools out there however there are some unique aspects to GIMP. Now one of those is hidden in the name GIMP so let's go ahead and take a look at what the name GIMP means. GIMP is actually an acronym that stands for GNU image manipulation program and the key here is GNU, the use of the word GNU here is actually an acronym as well standing for GNU is not Unix and so this kind of gives a philosophical background as to what the GIMP is all about. Now of course if you're not familiar with GNU or GNU Linux or Linux or Unix it might not make any sense to you, well, essentially what those are are operating systems that are typically going to be maintained by communities. Now of course Unix is something that's more specific to a single company however there have been offshoots of Unix including GNU and Linux. Now, the GIMP was created by two students as a class project and it just has expanded from there. Now, in the words of these students, "GIMP is our answer to the current lack of free or at least reasonably priced image manipulation software for GNU Linux and Unix in general." GIMP is currently developed and maintained but the GIMP community of developers as free open source software. Now what this means to you, a consumer is that GIMP is available to you for free, now this is a concept that's kind of difficult to explain because there are a couple of nuances to it and I will talk about that in just a moment. Now, open source however is a little bit easier to tackle. Basically what open source means is that the source code for these programs is going to be available to the general public. And this is a great thing of course because it allows people to manipulate that code as they need to for their own specific purposes. So these are a couple of things that make GIMP pretty unique in terms of raster based image editing programs. Now of course there are other raster based image editing programs out there that are also going to be free and open source, however GIMP is probably one of the most popular image editing tools out there for a couple of different reasons. Now one of the biggest reasons is that there are versions and ports available for GIMP for a large number of our major platforms including as mentioned before GNU and Linux and in fact if you're using one of these distributions you probably already have this program installed, it's also available for Unix, and that's no surprise either because that's already been discussed, GIMP is also going to be available for most of your Windows installations and for most of your Mac OS installations, however there are a couple of caveats to both of these and we'll discuss that whenever we get into setting up your system. Now, even though GIMP is available for all of these different platforms and it does work on all of those platforms it tends to work best on the GNU Linux and Unix systems, now this is because GIMP was created in that environment and it's available on these other platforms because they have been ported over to those systems so it's not working in its native environment, however, it's still going to work and a lot of the times it's going to work just as well as if it was on the Linux system. Now there's one last thing I want to mention here about GIMP, whenever you're talking to people, they may end up saying the GIMP instead of GIMP and officially it is GIMP it just so happens that whenever people are talking they happen to put a The in front of it so it's a matter about personal preference about how you're going to be discussing this, just know that some people prefer to leave the The off the front of it and just refer directly to GIMP as GIMP, now this is primarily because GIMP is a product more or less it's not an object kind of like a chair, so if I'm talking about the chair I'm going to say the chair, if I'm talking about a software application I would say the name of the software application, so instead of saying the GIMP as if it's a chair I say GIMP. So, kind of keep that in mind and just know that there are some people who will have particular ways that they would like to hear GIMP being referenced and for me, I'm going to end up flipping back and forth between saying GIMP and saying the GIMP and that concludes this tutorial about the basic nature of GIMP.