Please don't change Beastie to another crap logo such as NetBSD!!!

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 8:00 AM -0500 2/11/05, Bart Silverstrim wrote:
>Just to sum up things as I understand it...
>
>People want to change the logo from Beastie to something else
>because Beastie isn't professional enough, so some committers
>decided to hold a contest for a new logo?

We thought it would be nice, after fifteen years, to see if our
much-larger user base has any interesting ideas for a new logo.
We thought it would be nice to reward people with a minor
amount of money as a prize.

>Out of curiosity, is Beastie so terrible, a logo, that a business
>would be stupid enough to base their server decisions based on it?

Businesses are stupid.  People who demand dedicated allegiance to
one single cartoon image are just as stupid.  Both are facts, and
neither is a late-breaking news item.

>Someone said people change logos all the time.  That's flat out
>wrong.  When a company spends mucho dinero on marketing their
>logo, they don't just flip around and decide to change their
>logo that they spent so much money and time getting mindshare
>with.  Have any examples of logos that have constantly changed?

We do constantly see companies change their logo.  That is not the
same thing as saying any *one* company is constantly changing *its*
logo.  Apple has changed its logo.  AT&T changed its logo several
times.  GE recently changed its one-line motto.  At one point,
McDonalds rebuilt every one of their stores from the old
"golden-arches" look to the newer "family restaurant" look -- and
that cost a hell of a lot more than any logo change.

Right now we're working with an image that was picked 15 years ago
for a very small open-source project.  We now claim to be several
orders of magnitude larger than that.  I doubt there is *any*
company who has stuck with it's original logo as it went from
"five guys running a hobby" to "millions of users".

>Since when did FreeBSD, a project always driven by volunteers and
>not by commercial matters, suddenly gain a marketing department
>that is trying to steer FreeBSD into the business sector?  Is
>FreeBSD starting to have marketing dictate technology instead of
>technology dictate marketing?

Some of those volunteers would like to see a new logo.  Others
would not.  The vast majority probably do not care at all.  Somehow
the ones who like the present logo seem to think they can simply
dismiss all comments from the other volunteers who would like a
new logo, as if the work done by THOSE volunteers is somehow
irrelevant.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu