Beastie, the FreeBSD Mascot

"Beastie," the FreeBSD Mascot

Linux has "Tux" the penguin; it seems only fair that FreeBSD should have its own mascot as well. So why is it a devil?

Figure 1.1. The popular BSD "Beastie" mascot artwork, © Kirk McKusick. In what should amuse animation fans, Pixar's John Lasseter drew this and several other renditions of Beastie.

The short answer is that it's not a devilit's a daemon. Daemons are the background processes that handle all automated tasks the system needs done. Daemons are actually wonderfully helpful things. If you've ever sent an email or visited a web page, you have used the services of a daemon without even knowing it. Windows XP also has daemons; they just aren't called that. Microsoft calls them "services" instead.

Note

Many observers of the BSD Daemon mascot carry the metaphor further and insist that the character's trident, or fork, is intended as a reference to the ability of the operating system to fork new processes, which means to create carbon copies of running processes so as to handle new requests, such as a new Apache process to serve a web surfer's demand for a web page, while still leaving Apache running and able to handle incoming requests from other visitors at the same time.

A controversial effort is underway to abolish the BSD mascot in deference to those users who consider it to be a religious affront. Naturally, there is an equally energetic defense of the character entrenched in the message boards of the BSD advocacy community, and we can surely expect the battle to rage on in the future. Now's your chance to develop your first emotional investment in FreeBSD: Will you be a defender of Beastie? Or will you call for his execution? This is the open-source community; your voice has as much chance to be heard and heeded as that of the most central FreeBSD committer!