These variants were all developed out of targeting a specific community need that NIH Image or ImageJ didn’t have, organizing or adding additional tools for convenience in one bundle, or making a custom version that is very use case specific. This is more than just tolerated by Rasband, he has encouraged it as another mechanism for addressing the diverse needs of the ImageJ analysis community. For example when NIH Image core development ceased in favor of focusing on ImageJ, this resulted in NIH Image not being ported to the OSX (Apple Inc.) operating system. There was a population of electron microscopists that did not want to change their workflow and ported NIH Image to ImageSXM that runs on OSX with a focus on electron microscopy analysis. Other variants gave rise because of the desire to improve access to new users and provide documentation. MBF_ImageJ was developed by Collins and colleagues to provide a comprehensive user manual with an organized preloaded plugin and macro structure for ImageJ so that users could follow the instructions to do certain steps such as thresholding
