KImageShop → Krayon → Krita, according to this article from 2009:
https://krita.org/en/posts/2009/the-history-of-kimageshop-kr...
I googled that because the "long dead German lawyer" in the op's article made my spider-sense tingle. Of course it was Gravenreuth, the bête noire of the German internet in the 90s and 2000s.
Oh, I didn't know that Krita used to be called something else. I can't find any details of what its name was before it was Krita though; do you happen to know what it was?