New Logo

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Peter Clutton wrote:

>>Ted wrote:
>>
>>Your opinion, they probably wouldn't agree.  If you decide Beastie isn't
>>important enough to bother defending, that's your choice.  Of course I
>>will note that you had no problem getting the attention for your books
>>by using Beastie images on their covers.
>>    
>>
>[...]
>
>And if you're referring using the beastie on his book The Complete
>FreeBSD, I hardly think it was responsible for it's success. Might
>have something to do with being one of the best books on FreeBSD
>sysadmin out there at the moment. Can't comment on his other books,
>haven't read them.
>  
>
Indeed, I expect the book was successful because it got good 
word-of-mouth reviews, though I also expect that anyone still buying 
things from a bookshop would have instantly recognised it as a FreeBSD 
book thanks precisely to Beastie on the cover.  If Beastie is on the 
spine as well, then it makes it easy to pick out from your bookshelf.

And this is precisely the point.  The book was being judged by the 
quality of what was inside it, not by the Beastie on the outside of it - 
which just made it easy to recognise.  Surely the same is supposed to be 
true of FreeBSD?  The logo, or mascot or whatever the heck you want to 
call it is for brand recognition; but FreeBSD should be judged by what 
it does and how well it does it.  For historical reasons, FreeBSD is 
recognised by Beastie.

And to whoever was complaining that all this argument in questions 
looked divisive and should stop: the whole logo contest couldn't have 
been better devised to foment division.  The whole process was carried 
out behind closed door and apparently instigated by someone with a 
specific anti-Beastie agenda.  The whole thing *could* have been handled 
differently, but for whatever reasons (none of which can be laudable) it 
wasn't.  The submissions could have been freely viewable; there could 
have been a mailing list devoted to discussion; and for those of us who 
find the whole logo/mascot distinction to be risible, Beastie could have 
been a possible winner.  None of these things happened.  FreeBSD may not 
(for good reasons) be a democracy, but neither, in most cases, is it a 
tyranny.  We can discuss the future development on mailing lists; 
numerous developers reply endlessly to to questions, comments and 
problems; development happens by (mostly) reasoned discussion and not by 
diktat.   The logo contest stands in stark contrast to that.

Whatever the merits or demerits of the "final" "logo" (and I do quite 
like the font), the contest itself stands as a shining example of how to 
piss people off.

--Alex