GIMP was originally created in 1995 as a student project and slowly developed through the 1990s with early versions having limitations like only supporting the Motif toolkit. In 1998, a Hollywood visual effects company paid GIMP developers to add deeper paint support like 16-bit and 32-bit color channels to better suit the needs of visual effects work. However, this work was never merged with the main GIMP codebase. In 2002, Cinepaint was created to continue supporting the visual effects industry. It wasn't until 2008 that GEGL, a graph-based image processing framework, began to be merged into GIMP which helped address the needs of visual effects work like deep color channels and layer effects. Linux was also gaining popularity