You know... I was very careful to use words like "generally" and "usually", but I did slip up at one point say the "general rules of the language" - this wasn't phrased fantastically as I'd meant it was, again, supposed to be a "usually/generally" statement and not a hard 100% fact. Like the pirates code in Pirates of the Caribbean, more "guideline" than actual hard rule.

Basically, acronym's tend to follow their own rules, which is whatever people as a whole tend to assign to them (like the other examples I'd provided) Of course, that's the one part that got focused on, so... whoops, sorry about that.

The word "gif" is a bit unique because, like a platypus, it fits into too many categories to really fit one thing specifically.

We have the creators saying "jif" because they liked being able to piggyback on Jif's "choosy mom's choose Jif" and liked to say "choosy developers choose gif."

Then we have people saying "Graphics" is a hard "g" and thus so should the word Gif.

Then we have people saying the rule of soft "g" is words like "giraffe" that have an "i" after the "g".

Then we have people arguing for words like "gimp" and "girth" that don't fit that.

If you wanted to say it had to be one way or the other, I'd agree that the creators of the word, in spite of their reasons behind choosing it, do get the last say in it. However, Wilhite also waited far too long to finally announce how he favored saying it and it took on it's own pronunciation by then - seriously, he came up with the term in 1987 and then finally states how he pronounced it in 2013.

At the end of the day I didn't say one way or the other was right, just that I could see why either way was used and that there's no need to make it more than it is when there are (like you said) no actual rules to it. ;)