Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 01:24:20 -0500 From: Will Andrews <will@physics.purdue.edu> To: Stanislav Posonsky <posonsky@iname.ru> Cc: advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: About The Symbolism Message-ID: <20001120012420.A90928@puck.firepipe.net> In-Reply-To: <NDBBKNAHOMHNAFGENLDAIEPOCDAA.posonsky@iname.ru>; from posonsky@iname.ru on Mon, Nov 20, 2000 at 02:03:52PM %2B0800 References: <NDBBKNAHOMHNAFGENLDAIEPOCDAA.posonsky@iname.ru>
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Sir, if you would read the advocacy mailing list archives, you'll find that this issue has been brought up a million times, and people keep rehashing it because of their ignorance. The fact is, it has absolutely nothing to do with Satanism or anything like it. On Mon, Nov 20, 2000 at 02:03:52PM +0800, Stanislav Posonsky wrote: > Can anyone give me an answer to my question why an impish creature is an > emblem of FreeBSD? And concerning the watchword `FreeBSD: The Power to > Serve`, what power is implied? It is not an impish creature. It's a daemon, which is a generic name for a server process, such as Apache, or inetd, syslogd, etc. The fork the daemon wields refers to the fork() system call. As you can see, there is no relationship between Satanic images and our mascot. > I like FreeBSD itself. It is a nice and the coolest OS of all times and > peoples! At the same time as an Orthodox believer I cannot and should not > use it because of such an ambiguous (or may be not ambiguous?) symbolism. It's not ambiguous. Sometimes there is more than one definition for similar (in appearance) symbols. > I think that the present state of things may present a serious obstacle to > a wider spread of FreeBSD in countries traditionally professing > Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Only if they are stubborn and unwilling to agree with the simple and fundamental fact that similar symbols can have fundamentally different meanings. In their case, it's their loss. By the way, there are plenty of people in Israel, the United Kingdom, India, and elsewhere that run FreeBSD. They do so because they understand the meaning of our daemon. > How essential, do you think, is such a symbolism for FreeBSD products line? > FreeBSD just like any other Unix OS is first of all a multi-user OS aiming > at being used by people of many nationalities, language groups and religious > beliefs. I personally think that it should not contain any points > dicriminating persons working with it in any way. It is essential to those that built the system thirty years ago and those that have continued to build on it since. Perhaps you don't realize it, but ~90% of the Internet runs on BSD technology, such as TCP/IP, BIND, Sendmail, etc. > Is it may be worth giving up this devilry in favour of a more neutral > symbolism? Once again (for the millionth plus one time), it is not a symbol coming close to associating with the devil. -- wca To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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