The BSD logo was originally drawn by John Lassetter, who would later write and direct Toy Story and a couple of other successful movies.
https://www.jacobelder.com/2024/01/17/director-of-toy-story-...
Previous discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39030991
EDIT: While the John Lassetter version became most popular he did not draw the original. Thanks to dagmx for pointing that out and the additional background info in their comment. Also there is a Wikipedia article about the BSD daemon with even more details about the history of the logo.
This is sort of incorrect. The BSD daemon was originally drawn by Phil Foglio. As seen here https://www.mckusick.com/beastie/jpg/foglio.jpg
Lasseter did a later (more current and iconic) revision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon?wprov=sfti1
Also John did more than just direct Toy Story.
Lasseter was one of the founders of Pixar , directed several movies, took over the chief creative officer role for both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, before eventually leaving after several allegations of sexual impropriety. He’s now heading up Skydance Animation for Larry Elissons son, and has a contractual liability clause for any further impropriety.
One of the big “never meet your heroes” examples, along with the other Pixar co-founder, Ed Catmull who was behind the industry wide wage fixing scandal. On the flip side he also invented so many technologies that are key to computer graphics today, including the alpha channel.
Somehow Steve jobs, famously abrasive, was the least problematic of the founders.
*multiple Hugo Award winner Phil Foglio.
I get that John Lasseter is probably the most well-known, but Phil Foglio and the Girl Genius team have been releasing quality work for decades.
Is that the same Phil Foglio that draws girl genius?
So both children of Larry are doing movies then, right? The daughter did the movie Her, which is funny, cause OpenAI used the same concept for ads.
Wonder if my children would achieve my dream to be a director. I only got it to being on stage as an assistant professor, and a deejay. And promoter also. The promoter is sort of director, but is more an executive production role really.
Well, I went to primary school with a heavy christian tradition and would probably have felt the same.
I'm very happy that someone decided to tell me at about age 12 that perhaps it's not all literally true and some people have other ideas. Some not even involving concepts like eternal damnation, original sin, an omnipotent being that turns women into salt pillars but allows for children with bone cancer to exist, and something as undefinable as an eternal soul. This ended my suffering. We have to feel bad for the people still in that system.
Of course we should also be well aware of what penguins love to do:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/09/sex-depravity-...
And it was long kept a secret.
From where I come from there is a saying which goes like ‘Good thing you pulled the small devil’ (and not the big one, implied).
Besides satanism or sheitanism as far as I know, is only objectified as the horn-y thing within a Christian (ok, Abrahamic to include Old Testament and Islam) framework. A thing with horns and a fork is not necessarily within this framework.
Should you want to look further, go take a look at Kali or potentially many other Hindu deities showing here and there as mascots. These are no entities to joke with, and humility is not part of this tradition.
So I say, leave small devil do his wonderful work and all the wonderful people who have us FreeBSD and as consequence Darwin, iOS, the TCP/IP stack and many more.
The disguise of actual Satan, should we agree is a thing, is never so obvious. And typically has more humane look, very often wears Prada.
As is mentioned in the thread, this is a far older "problem" for BSD than this 2011 thread.
The oldest story I know about this "issue" was linked here (complete with a late 80s SNL joke):
http://monster-island.org/tinashumor/humor/daemon.html
The page itself is now offline, but the original was around at least as far back as 1999.
(Wayback link) https://web.archive.org/web/19991012013717/http://www.monste...
I remember my wife describing the funny look she got from our "traditional" next door neighbor as she took the latest edition of the BSD journal out of the mailbox. Never went any further than that.
But if you choose to use a literal hell-themed demon as your product's logo, don't be surprised if it limits your user base.
I don't think 'making it big' is the point of FreeBSD anyway. Right now the share of the desktop market is 0.01% (of which I'm a proud part)
I'm not hoping for 'the year of FreeBSD'. I wouldn't even want that to happen because with that comes much commercial involvement like Linux is seeing.
There's always reasons people don't choose a product and there's much much bigger ones leading people not to choose FreeBSD than this.
We used to have Demon internet in the UK. The local vicar told us proudly that he was using it and thought it was funny.
Depends how backwards people are…
Their phone numbers all had 666 in them, if I recall correctly.
Typical :). Our one collects mistletoe and hands it out after Christmas service to acknowledge the old ways, and says so with a smile while passing it out!
It limits it for the better.
The strange thing is, there are lot of cathedral churches with all sorts of demonic-looking creatures on them as decorations; not to mention quite an amount of folklore in which some saint or other would overpower the lesser imps with the strength of his faith and make them do his bidding.
It's such a shame, because I really like the FreeBSD/NetBSD daemon logo, the FreeBSD project had a lot of nice variations in the past for the Walnut creek CD-ROM sets [1]. The 'glass ball with horns' is far more boring, and I'm sure would still offend some people because it has horns.
[1] E.g. https://i.redd.it/ha7w5438mq031.jpg
“It’s not the Devil, it’s a daemon.” That’s a not a conversation I would want to have.
The etymology of “daemon” in the computer sense is Maxwell’s Daemon, a thought experiment involving a mischievous demon.
Even to an above average intelligence person, that’s a lot of explaining.
Most pre-modern peoples believed in demons, and most people believe images have power.
This seems like a violation of the best practices of logo design.
From Wikipedia, "Daemon is actually a much older form of "demon"; daemons have no particular bias towards good or evil, but rather serve to help define a person's character or personality"
That being said, while the etymology of the term may not be directly referring to the modern rendition as the "devil", doesn't the logo (red thing with horns and trident) directly reference it (as a pun on daemon/demon)?
In some sense I do _understand_ where the person in OP's story is coming from. We imbue words and images with power through collective culture (Stallman certainly has remarked on the power of a name, see [1]), and if you had placed great (negative) emotional weight behind a concept, then you would be distressed to see it in something you interact with.
Ironically I think if the actual logo ended up being the "bad taste" version Wikipedia mentions as
>a picture of the BSD Daemon blowtorching a Solaris logo
it'd actually end up as more acceptable since it now gets framed as a narrative ("why a demon? Because who else would dare take on solaris")
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-call-it-the-swindle.en.ht...
@CppPro the logo really annoys you, doesn't it?
2 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41818595
>>1. Change the logo from a demon to something else. (no matter if it is a play on the word "deamon", it is repulsive to many of the 2.4 billion Christians that can be potential users of FreeBSD)
I have been denounced :(
Keep your head up ;)
Resolved: WORKSFORME
Comment: cats are also horned devils but they seem to be universally accepted anyway
(2011)
Eh could be worse. My daughter’s boyfriend’s parents won’t use Apple stuff because the logo has a bite out of it.
Hilariously though they are paranoid about China and Chinese influence and go on about it all the time including Apple making stuff in China but have Huawei phones.
It's not just the bite but the Apple I was first sold for 666$
I am trying to grasp what I have just read. I may be able to understand if this is sarcasm probably
I don't know if this story is true, but the story of Greek police raiding my local D&D store and confiscating all books to check for satanism in 2001 is very true. For a long time, Kaissa (the store) was left without manuals or adventure books.
Having lived through the 90s as a young adult, I can assure you back then the Family Values crowd was just as annoying and censorious as the Woko Haram is today. 2011 seems a bit late for that kind of thing, but it's entirely plausible a few NPCs didn't get the patch yet.
Down under, we have a term for them: wowsers [0]
The term was coined a hundred years ago. Every generation has a different version of the moral scare that will corrupt the children and needs urgent policing. The policing is always about controlling other people's behaviour (rather than, for example, educating the children).
The latest version also goes after adults.
It sounds like a fake story. Doesn't pass the smell test for me:
> I just got a call from the owner of a hotel for which we provide hotspot service.... The owner could make no headway by explaining that the besneakered mascot was a cartoon character and was a daemon, not the Devil. And she feared upsetting the guest even more if she said that large portions of the same software are inside every Mac and iPad.
What "owner of a hotel," 1) knows this much about BSD to explain to a random guest and 2) outsources their wifi hotpot service? Then everyone, owner and guest starts calling the service provider about controversy, instead of the guest relocating to other hotel in the area.
Yeah obviously fake, who ever calls people. It's not the owner of the hotel, it's the person / company who setup their WiFi. Presumably on the wifi connection page there's a number to call for tech support.
The first sentence says:
"I just got a call from the owner of a hotel..."
The story is probably all true, even though it does have a bit of that "Elderly man set cruise control on at their RV then got up to make a sandwich" urban myth/chain letter vibe to it.
The FreeBSD Code of Conduct mentions being welcoming to people regardless of religion, but by using imagery that explicitly comes from religious depictions of evil in their logo they're blatantly being unwelcoming to a lot of religious people. Would they react differently (albeit more politely) if someone complained today, now the Code of Conduct exists, especially as 'fixing' this would require a full rebrand?
I think the hotel guest was right to complain, and in my understanding of the Bible as a Christian I would say it is appropriate to refuse to do business with someone using such images, but also the image does not have any 'power'. That is, it is potentially immoral to associate with it, but the image shouldn't be 'scary' to any Christian, it's just a picture.
The hotel guest was certainly not right to complain.
There are people - often religious - who have a funny definition of "welcoming" which comes perilously close to "either believe as I do, or at least have the decency to pretend that you do in public."
Shucks to that. The guest is demanding that others sacrifice their own integrity to stroke her ego, and placate her obviously fragile beliefs. It is not the job of everyone else in the world to suspend their beliefs to sustain yours.
It's also funny how this sort of thing never seems to work the other way. These Christians will happily walk into a secular establishment, and demand that others comport themselves in accordance with Christian standards of behaviour, and yet they seem very upset when I walk into a church, demanding steamy man on man action. Rather unwelcoming, I thought!
Of course, most religious people are nothing like this (shout out to you!), and some irreligious people are exactly like this, but it's a trait that does seem to correlate with all-encompassing systems of belief.
You have a fair point in general, but in this particular case I think the guest is overreacting, and accommodating such people borders being tolerant to intolerance.
I agree that the guest shouldn't have said it was 'abuse' to put the logo up. There is no actual harm that can come from that picture.
> blatantly being unwelcoming to a lot of religious people.
It's maybe a clever tactic to keep religious extremists away.
>as a Christian I would say it is appropriate to refuse to do business with someone using such images
Send from a Iphone ;)
