Devil Mascot

[Bart Silverstrim]

On Jun 13, 2004, at 8:02 PM, Edward Hendrie wrote:

>     Why do you have a Devil for a trademark mascot?  From a marketing
> perspective, you are shooting yourselves in the foot.  There are many 
> people
> of various religious backgrounds who will be dissuaded from trying 
> FreeBSD
> because they have religious objections to a product that is promoted 
> by a
> devil.

He's a play on the word daemon.  From the jargon file:
*****
daemon

  <operating system> /day'mn/ or /dee'mn/ (From the mythological
  meaning, later rationalised as the acronym "Disk And Execution
  MONitor") A program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies
  dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is
  that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a
  daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an
  action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a
  daemon).

  For example, under ITS writing a file on the LPT spooler's
  directory would invoke the spooling daemon, which would then
  print the file. The advantage is that programs wanting files
  printed need neither compete for access to, nor understand any
  idiosyncrasies of, the LPT. They simply enter their
  implicit requests and let the daemon decide what to do with
  them. Daemons are usually spawned automatically by the
  system, and may either live forever or be regenerated at
  intervals.

Unix systems run many daemons, chiefly to handle requests
  for services from other hosts on a network. Most of these
  are now started as required by a single real daemon, inetd,
  rather than running continuously. Examples are cron (local
  timed command execution), rshd (remote command execution),
rlogind and telnetd (remote login), ftpd, nfsd (file
  transfer), lpd (printing).

  Daemon and demon are often used interchangeably, but seem to
  have distinct connotations (see demon). The term "daemon"
  was introduced to computing by CTSS people (who pronounced
  it /dee'mon/) and used it to refer to what ITS called a
dragon.

  [Jargon File]

  (1995-05-11)
********

>
>     You may think that is a small issue, but when you are trying to 
> create
> market awareness you need a mascot that evokes simplicity and 
> goodwill, not
> one that evokes evil and deception.

I don't think they are creating a "marketing presence".  FreeBSD 
"users" aren't making money off this.  It's not a business.  Many of 
the "old school" users probably really don't care about taking over the 
desktops around the world...we want our workstations and servers to 
stay up with as little downtime and hassle as possible.  If someone 
prefers to be offended by a logo and stay away from it, then they can 
put up with the additional hassles of Windows or move to a Linux distro 
of their choice.  Doesn't cut into our profit margin :-)

>     Look at how MSN is marketing its ISP.  They use characters dressed 
> in
> harmless butterfly costumes.  Linux, has done the same with its pudgy 
> cute
> penguin.  You might want to rethink your mascot.

JW Gacy was a clown, MS has a butterfly....both look harmless...judging 
by a mascot, while important for marketing, won't really affect a 
"product" that isn't reliant on marketing but instead on merit.