please, a little sanity about the logo

[Roger 'Rocky' Vetterberg]

cpghost at cordula.ws wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 10:53:23PM -0500, Steve Ireland wrote:
> 
>>This leads to a suggestion others have already made, a splitting 
>>of FBSD into hobbyist and professional branches. The hobbyists 
>>keep Beastie, the .org site, and the non-profit status. The 
>>professionals get the new logo, the .com site, and pay for use 
>>and support (perhaps an annual subscription?).
> 
> Quite frankly, I don't understand the current push for
> a "commercial-friendly" logo on behalf of the FreeBSD Project.

Thats obvious. If you did understand it, we would not have this 
discussion.

> There have always been a few companies that provided
> a commercial version on CDs, and nobody would have any
> objections that these companies use their own logos to
> push their own version (or an unmodified version) of
> FreeBSD into the enterprise.

This is true, but to me, this solution feels like inventing the 
wheel several times.
  We have a perfectly capable os without a logo. Instead of 
creating a logo for it, you suggest we fork the perfect os into 
another perfect os and create a logo for that. I do not 
understand your logic.

> This is similar to SuSE, RedHat and others who use their own
> logos to distribute the one and only Linux kernel and
> an assorted set of libraries and utilities. "Linux" itself
> doesn't have a logo either (if we followed the party line
> that Tux and Beastie were mascots and not logos).

Thats because nobody runs Linux. They run RedHat, SuSe, Debian 
etc. Linux is a kernel, FreeBSD is an OS. There is a big difference.
Your logic here implies that the suggestion would be to create a 
logo for the FreeBSD *kernel*, and that has afaik never even been 
brought up.

> The FreeBSD Project should IMHO remain vendor neutral,
> and stick to code development. 

Absolutely. No argument here, and so far I have not heard anyone 
else, pro or con image change, argue otherwise.

> There's absolutely no need
> to commercialize anything; much less need for any kind of
> logo. 

Now here I have to strongly disagree. See why below.

> The project did very well without a logo (and with
> Beastie), and there's no reason to have one now, just to
> appease those zealots (as you've pointed out). Just leave
> this to the vendors.

If something does "very well", and a small change would make it 
do even better without sacrificing anything, would that be bad?
If it was only to appease some zealot, I would be strongly 
against it as well. However, I struggle daily to push freebsd 
into corporate environments, so I *know* that our totally 
un-professional image actually keeps us back, bigtime!
As pointed out earlier, FreeBSD runs on more edge webservers then 
most of the linux distros combined, and still hardly anyone 
outside the community of hardcore geeks knows what BSD is. Just 
that sentence alone should get people to realize that maybe we 
are missing something here!

--
R