Swag... new choices?

[Samy Al Bahra]

On Fri, 3 Oct 2003 15:32:59 +0100
"Paul Robinson" <p.robinson at mmu.ac.uk> wrote:

> Ahhh, but they have completely free use of their puffy fish mascot and
> a bunch of talented guys producing original artwork, music, the whole
> lot. We have more developers and fewer artists, and a mascot we don't
> really own. That makes it difficult to produce a wide range of
> artwork.
Very true. A major problem is the fact that we have to notify McKusick
for all of our use of the daemon (for project art), everything is under
his terms. I was working on a song with masta (of wifiBSD) a while
back, unfortunately, I had higher priorities so the project was dropped.

> Perhaps a competition of some sort? 
I don't think we should hold a competition, I know a lot of users out
there (some being talented artists) have created their own art of some
sort. I urge these to step-up and help me finish off this gallery to
create a more complete set of artwork (more backgrounds, more splash
screens, some icons, etc...). I am sniffing around IRC
networks for these artists :) Personally, those pieces of work were for
complete fun, this simple image composition is great therapy for me.

> I think it also might be an idea
> to get some distributors further afield than FreeBSD mall - I've had
> genuinly AWFUL experiences with them, and a lot of people don't want
> to deal with them. Plus, in Europe, there are plenty of distributors
> prepared to handle this side of the Atlantic.
I could do this for the Middle East (we have warehouses littered around
here that are willing to deal with this). I just don't see the potential
for this region at the moment (something to change...a future goal
during my time here).

> 
> The real problem though is free use of the logo/mascot. To really open
> up the market like OpenBSD has, you kind of have to consider... dare I
> say it?... changing the mascot. If you want to produce lots of mass
> produced stuff with loads of artwork and sell them, you can't use
> beastie unless you've cleared every item with McKusick:
> 
> http://www.mckusick.com/beastie/mainpage/copyright.html
Yes. I ran into this problem with the GNOME splash screen (since it will
soon be the default one for GNOME 2.4). I hold very very high respect
for McKusick but I think that his terms for the use of the daemon are a
bit too constraining (though, his license is vague most could walk away
with derivatives of it).

I think we should stick to a daemon-type logo (though, something
completely different than the current thing, maybe a gecko-daemon? :P).
Eithercase, this is a huge step and something all the community should
agree to.


--
+-----------------------------------+
| Samy Al Bahra | samy at kerneled.com |
|-----------------------------------|
|     B3A7 F5BE B2AE 67B1 AC4B      |
|     0983 956D 1F4A AA54 47CB      |
|-----------------------------------|
|     http://www.kerneled.com       |
+-----------------------------------+