BSD Daemon

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BSD Daemon, aka "Beastie"

BSD Daemon is the BSD operating system's mascot, named after a daemon, a type of software program common on Unix-like operating systems. Although a Walnut Creek advertiser wrongly named it "Chuck," perhaps because of its shoes, and some call it "beastie," a phonetic pronunciation of BSD (BeeS Dee), the daemon's proper name is just "BSD Daemon". It usually carries a trident to symbolize the daemon's forking of processes.

The copyright of the BSD Daemon is held by Marshall Kirk McKusick who tries to ensure that it is properly used to identify only BSD-based software and services. The current popular version of BSD Daemon was drawn by animation director John Lasseter on March 22, 1988, while the first version of the logo was drawn by comic artist Phil Foglio, as a returned favor to Mike O'Brien for lockpicking his roommate's safe in 1976, and were drawn for the first national UNIX meeting, and appeared on the first decade's worth of UNIX T-shirts.

Prior to selecting the current mascot, Puffy, OpenBSD used a BSD daemon with a halo, this image was used during the 2.3 and 2.4 releases.

The logo for FreeBSD

Prior to the current logo, the FreeBSD project used John Lasseter's version of the daemon as their logo as well as mascot, however the project felt that the usage of the daemon as a logo was not effective enough. There were several reasons for this, most importantly that the daemon was not unique to FreeBSD, since all the BSDs make use of it. Significant other reasons were that the image was considered unprofessional by the FreeBSD core and that it did not function well for promotional material using two or three colours or when rescaled. A contest of was written to create a new logo for the project in February 2005, and the winner was changed to the official logo as of November 2005.

[edit] ASCII image

Prior to version 6.x of FreeBSD this image of the BSD Daemon appeared in the startup menu, though it can still be set as startup image in later versions. It is also used in the daemon_saver screensaver.

                ,        ,         
               /(        )`        
               \ \___   / |        
               /- _  `-/  '        
              (/\/ \ \   /\        
              / /   | `    \       
              O O   ) /    |       
              `-^--'`<     '       
             (_.)  _  )   /        
              `.___/`    /         
                `-----' /          
   <----.     __ / __   \          
   <----|====O)))==) \) /====      
   <----'    `--' `.__,' \         
                |        |         
                 \       /       /\
            ______( (_  / \______/ 
          ,'  ,-----'   |          
          `--{__________)

[edit] License

The BSD daemon's usage is restricted by McKusick, and must comply with the following license:

"Individuals may use the daemon for their personal use within the bounds of good taste (an example of bad taste was a picture of the BSD daemon blowtorching a Solaris logo). When reasonably possible, I would like the text "BSD Daemon Copyright 1988 by Marshall Kirk McKusick. All Rights Reserved." to be included. This text need not be etched into the figure or garishly displayed when using the daemon as say an Icon in a web frame. A good example of how to handle the due credit in a web page is to create a link from the daemon picture to the following text:

BSD Daemon Copyright 1988 by Marshall Kirk McKusick.
All Rights Reserved.
Permission to use the daemon may be obtained from:
Marshall Kirk McKusick
1614 Oxford St
Berkeley, CA 94709-1608
USA
or via email at mckusick@mckusick.com"