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.
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