NetBSD Announces Logo Design Competition

jschauma writes "The NetBSD Project has announced that it has launched an international competition for the creation of a new logo. There is a cash prize of US $100.00 for the winning entry. The successful logo will also have wide exposure, featuring in all NetBSD material including, but not limited to; the NetBSD.org web site, software media, apparel, and business systems. The competition will close on February 29, 2004. The rules of the competition, submission information and the design brief can be found in the official announcement, which has already spawned some discussion on the netbsd-advocacy and current-users MailingLists." The announcement notes that the current logo is "too complicated... hard to reproduce... [and] has negative cultural, and religious ramifications."

Iwo Jima photo by Joe Rosenthal

[basingwerk]

The original Iwo Jima photo by Joe Rosenthal was faked the day after the victory. In the NetBSD reproduction, the US troops have been replaced by devils, and the mountain top is a pile of computer hardware. The US flag has become a simple banner proclaiming NET Bsd. Notwithstanding any political correctness in this decision, it is hard to see the relevance of the current logo.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're asking about the OS, it's pretty good. The troll below was thinking of OpenBSD -- and a bit off the mark -- but basically, think OpenBSD without the security focus, with the conveniences of FreeBSD (sometimes done better; pkgsrc [netbsd.org] is rather sweet, and claims to handle builds on Linux as well!), relatively small installation size, cutting-edge features, and of course, ridiculous portability. Definitely Just The Thing for that 486DX2-50 collecting dust (unless it's to be a firewall or bastion host - then you want OpenBSD), and quite useful anywhere else as well.

If you're planning an 'intensive' workload (more specifically, "if you're planning something that will actually put stress on a $2,000+ server"), then FreeBSD and soon DragonFly [dragonflybsd.org] will be worth looking into. (DragonFly will be cool for other reasons, but then, I'm a fanboy.)

As to this logo business... Well, in a perfect world, people would use BSDs more often, and accept any lingering 'incorrectness' to the logo (it's supposed to be a daemon, not a demon, so the saying goes) as the price paid for getting a great, maintainable, don't-even-have-to-follow-GPL-sharealike-rules OS. But pragmatically, a lot of NetBSD core seems to work for Wasabi Systems [wasabisystems.com] -- call them the RedHat of NetBSD, but of course, the overall NetBSD community doesn't quite have the size and clout of the 'Linux community,' so keeping those guys fed is more intrinsic to the project's survival in the near term. If the logo's losing them contracts (and what's worse than losing a contract for nontechnical reasons?), then hey, maybe it's time for the weird to turn pro.

Re:$100?

[perly-king-69]

Joke! Don't be so touchy.

But, in 2001 $100 would have bought me 71. Today it'll buy me 55, which I reckon to be about 1/3rd less.

Re:Iwo Jima photo by Joe Rosenthal

[towzzer]

Acutally the flag raising was done twice right after each other, the first flag was very small so they decided to take it down and find a larger pole to put it on, as it was being put up the photographer 'Joe Rosenthal' snapped the picture as he was just coming to the top of mountain. Later , when the flag was fully raised, he took a posed picture. Of course the accidental picture was the one that became famous.

Re:It's not that they're devils ....

[tiluki]

Try explaining that to some people [jesussave.us].

Apple, BSD, daemon processes... They just see their own association and fit it to whatever ideological conditioning they've been reared on, before propagating the next generation in the perpetual cycle of ignorance and fear...

Re:Looks fine to me!

[Queuetue]

Actually, before the nazis co-opted it, the swastika was known to stand for the 4 "l"s intertwined - Love, Life, Luck and Light. It was used in the same places the Red Cross is used these days, and often on correspondance like we use X's and O's in the US. For ages, one of India's most loved goes, Ganesha, uses the swastika as a personal symbol (although not as much these days.) It was used by the ancient greeks to indicate something was wholesome and trustworthy - and was remembered that way by the Europeans of the 20's and 30's. That's exactly why the fascists picked it.

In other words, the swastika is a symbol of love and light. Or it's symbolic of the evil of the Nazi party.

Or, in reality, yes - it's just a bunch of lines. Any power given to them is just silly and artificial.

Also, if someone finds a picture offensive, I'd recommend s/he not look at it. I'm getting sick of all of the P.C. thuggery that takes place and is claimed to be "tolerance." The candyasses that I encounter on a daily basis are making the modern world weak and unfit to survive. If we can't get it together, the developing world will replace us - and we'll deserve it.

Re:Looks fine to me!

[Azghoul]

Someone tell this idiot he's not insightful.

"Trust me", give me a break. "burning you as a devil"... I don't know if you're trying to be funny or you're more ignorant than the people you're trying (and failing miserably) to belittle.

Grow up.

Re:A polar bear!

[axxackall]

Polar bears have no chance to eat pinguins - they are living on opposite poles. So, polar bears would be more appropriate for Microsoft.

Re:Looks fine to me!

[zerocool^]

Demon comes from the greek word diamon, or, more accurately delta-iota-alpha-mu-omicron-nu, depending on how it's declined. That's singular nominative (i think).

In helenistic greek, i.e. around the time of the peloponnesian wars, the word diamon meant sort of "guardian spirit", but implying that it could be either a mischievous spirit or a malevolent spirit. To blame things on a kakodiamon was to say that you had bad luck, and imply that you must be plagued by a mischievous diamon.

When the word was moved into other languages (i think it came to english via romance languages, stemming from latin), it changed to demon, and was christianized to mean "demon", i.e. servant of the dark lord (satan, not your boss, or bill gates, or $funny_guy_we_hate).

Yeah for me with my taking greek 1105. It was hard as crap, but wow, I learned a lot. For instance, this happened to a lot of words in greek. Take, for instance, the word that's used (at least in the new testamant in sinaiticus and the vatican codex) to mean "sin". In ancient greek, it meant "mistake" not "transgression". Although, I think that's one that the greeks had started to shift the meaning of before the christians got to it.

But, yeah, I've got this big thing for etymology, being 18 hours away from a history degree, and still eagerly taking every social sciences class I can fit in. For instance, when I see WindowsXP, I see windows, version christ. XP are the greek letters Chi Rho, which are the first letters of the word "christ", chi-rho-iota-sigma-tau-omicron-sigma. They're the letters constantine the great saw in the sky when he converted his army to christianity at the milvian bridge in 312(? i'm close, and i'm not looking it up).

Also, if you know a little greek, you know jack chick is full of shit in his Death Cookie [chick.com] tract, which says that IHS on the cookie that catholics eat at communion stand for Isis, Horus, and Seb, egyptian gods, and that it's pagan worship to be a catholic. Sorry, Chick, but IHS are the first three leters of jesus in greek, iota-eta-sigma-upsulon-sigma (remember, indiana jones and the last crusade? "Jehova starts with an I"? Yeah, there is no J in greek, it was Iota, in both jehova and jesus).

But, look, here, i've done rattled off my head for ever about nothing.

Just suffice it to say, when you see demon, you don't have to think servant of satan, from the pits of hell, sent to torment the true believing christians. It's just a spirit, who may have the attitude of a prankster.

~Will

Re: Looks fine to me!

[Punk Walrus]

> > [and] has negative cultural, and religious
> > ramifications.

> No, it doesn't. It's a cartoon devil.

No, it's not. It's a series of daemons putting up a flag [netbsd.org], reminicent of the famous photo of Iwo Jima [att.net]. Check the links.

> It doesn't offend anyone. Really.

I don't know, if I was Japanese, I'd probably be offended. A lot of American soldiers killed a lot of Japanese. When it was all over there were only 250 Japanese prisoners out of the original 22,000 defenders of the island. The rest were killed. General Kuribayashi commited suicide (hari kari). The Marines lost 7,000 killed and 19,000 wounded. International conflict is not comfortable thing to talk about, and not a good idea for a world-wide logo.

Also, have you ever heard the fates of these soldiers in that famous photo? Three of the men were killed in combat within days of the flag raising. Not exactly inspiring for a logo, either.

> If it were hanging on a cross or wearing a
> turban, *then* maybe it'd need changing.

Cross, probably. Turban? A lot of cultures have turbans. What's wrong with a turban? Keeps your hair up, head shaded from the sun, is a symbol of wisdom, and a cool place to store your cobra...! No, wait, skip the last one.

Re:It's not that they're devils ....

[Imperator]

That site is a hoax, like Landover but subtle enough that most people don't figure it out. I can't find it anymore but on their "4KIDZ" page they had a peppered moth [utm.edu] teaching about creationism. No real creationists would ever mention the peppered moth, unless they were trying to discredit the evidence. There are lots of other things that are just a bit too ridiculous to be real. That's not to say that real creationists aren't ridiculous, but they don't explicitly point out the hilarious consequences of their beliefs, like kangaroos in the Middle East [jesussave.us]. If you don't know any of these people it's easy to think this site represents their views, but it's just a little bit over the top.

Re:angels?

[dasunt]

According to Christian Theology and Mythology, Lucifer (Son of Morning) was God's right hand man, basically the most capable and intelligent angel.

Then he rebelled and took a 1/3rd of the angels with him.

Re:An opportunity...

[pschmied]

Would it be possible to use pkgsrc as the main package management system on a Linux box, say, Slackware? What I mean is, forget Slackware's package management system altogether and replace it with NetBSD's pkgsrc.

NetBSD has pre-built binaries for just what you describe! Check out http://www.pkgsrc.org [pkgsrc.org] for details.

They've got bootstrap source that will compile on a lot, plus binary packages for a bunch of operating systems including Slackware (And Darwin. And Debian. And Irix. And Solaris :-) )

I'm not sure of the state of all the packages on all the different platforms, but my guess is that it works similarly to on NetBSD.

One of the cool side effects of their correct and clean implementation is that you can do interesting things like build embedded NetBSD from a Windows workstation. The cross-compile support is quite simply the most complete.

-Peter