OSNews

Well, I love beastie, and I don't think it should be changed. It is very characteristic of FreeBSD, especially now that all BSD's have distinct logos. Not that they didn't, but sometimes for noobs it was easie to confuse OpenBSD's daemon (with the O or halo above its head) and Beastie - not anymore as puffy the blowfish is more and more being associated with OpenBSD.

Anyhow, I understand the reasoning behind the logo change of NetBSD ... well, somewhat - because not only daemons were in it (religious concern) but it was also a parody of a historical event (I wasn't offended, nor should anyone imho, but it happens, especially in the current political climate where super-patriotism is en vogue again). Added to this was the fact that the pic was too complex to function as a logo. Now from all of these concerns FreeBSD's Beastie has only one (and only in the eyes of one set of zealots not two). Beastie functions perfectly as a logo, and it is recognizable, the Handbook explains its function, and besides, if we follow this reasoning to it's logical conclusion, then sshd, httpd, etc. should remove the trailing d - why? Because: what if someone asks the reason behind the strange names of these services, and when he or she (yup, I'm politically correct) hears that the d stands for daemon, turns away from unix/linux and will install IIS instead? Huh?

Nevertheless, maybe a compromise is possible. I am no artist, so I have no idea how we could do it, but isn't it possible to design a logo that has beastie in it in some way? An svg logo where beastie is still recognizable, but doesn't have that reddish hue or something - a schematic representation of beastie perhaps? Also, why not put a * on advertisement material with explanation (taken from the Handbook):

"3.8 Daemons, Signals, and Killing Processes

When you run an editor it is easy to control the editor, tell it to load files, and so on. You can do this because the editor provides facilities to do so, and because the editor is attached to a terminal. Some programs are not designed to be run with continuous user input, and so they disconnect from the terminal at the first opportunity. For example, a web server spends all day responding to web requests, it normally does not need any input from you. Programs that transport email from site to site are another example of this class of application.

We call these programs daemons. Daemons were characters in Greek mythology; neither good or evil, they were little attendant spirits that, by and large, did useful things for mankind. Much like the web servers and mail servers of today do useful things. This is why the BSD mascot has, for a long time, been the cheerful looking daemon with sneakers and a pitchfork."

Of course I have a simplified version of this text in mind.