Pleasing both suits and the community (Logo Contest)

[Farid Hajji]

Hi,

some posters here suggested that a "professional" logo (whatever
that means) would please the suits and help the development of
FreeBSD (drivers, new code...) and its deployment in the enterprise.

This is difficult to predict, to say the least. Some of you may
have experienced difficulties introducing FreeBSD to your company
or university, but that is by no means representative.

There are not so many companies that would provide code to the
project. The few of those that do, are mostly technically active
and very few of them would care about the logo (or Beastie). Most
of them would just say: "Hey, your user base is too small to
justify our time porting drivers."

So that leaves R&D corps out of the equation. The other point is
to increase the user base within the mainstream (so that R&D
can say: "okay, we can now start developing code for fBSD"), and
here, *some* (but by no means the majority of) suits may be
sensitive to a Beastie logo.

We therefore have two camps that are fiercely opposed. On the
one hand, there are those would would like to appease "the suits"
and aggressively commercialize FreeBSD. On the other hand, we have
a lot of grass roots sysadmins and other users, who have been the
driving force behind FreeBSD's success in recent years, you don't
want to have people mess with Beastie in any way (including removing
it from it's role as a logo).

How can we reconcile both camps? Why not keep FreeBSD absolutely
non-commercial, with Beastie as a logo *and* mascot, and fork
"sanitized" distributions (a la linux) that could be sold to
those ultra-conservative suits? Like FundiBSD or so? (Nah, just
kidding). But seriously: the only people who would be interested
in commercializing FreeBSD are enterprises that are not related
to The FreeBSD Project. Let them create (and use) their *own*
logos (beastified or not, that's their call) and *please* leave
this project alone.

This way, the FreeBSD Project would be saved from being taken
over by people with a political agenda, and remain the excellent
technical development platform it has been since its creation.

Farid Hajji.