The daemon is not a religious symbol, but...

[Marc Fonvieille]

On Sun, Aug 22, 2004 at 07:11:53PM +0300, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> I've been chatting with Hanspeter Roth (hampi at rootshell dot be) about
> his dislike of the daemon image in the 5.X boot loader menu and he was
> satisfied with a patch like the one below that disables just the daemon
> image with minimal changes to the boot loader scripts:
> 
> : Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 17:12:19 +0200
> : From: Hanspeter Roth <hampi at rootshell.be>
> : Subject: Re: Beastie by default
> :
> : > %%%
> : > Index: beastie.4th
> : > ===================================================================
> : > RCS file: /home/ncvs/src/sys/boot/forth/beastie.4th,v
> : > retrieving revision 1.8
> : > diff -u -r1.8 beastie.4th
> : > --- beastie.4th       9 Jan 2004 19:20:47 -0000       1.8
> : > +++ beastie.4th       20 Aug 2004 14:24:59 -0000
> : > @@ -141,7 +141,7 @@
> : >       8 menuY !
> : >       5 menuX !
> : >       clear
> : > -     46 4 print-beastie
> : > +\    46 4 print-beastie
> : >       42 20 2 2 box
> : >       13 6 at-xy ." Welcome to FreeBSD!"
> : >       printmenuitem ."  Boot FreeBSD [default]" bootkey !
> : > %%%
> :
> : Ok, thanks.
> : It would be nice if this were in the manual or in the faq.
> 
> I very much dislike the fact that our logo, which is an established mark of
> the FreeBSD operating system for so many years, brings up bad feelings to
> some users, but I also think I can understand that this is something that
> quickly becomes a religious war (sic) and nobody is going to accept the
> fact that they might be seeing too much in a logo that is otherwise
> unrelated to the religious belief or unbelief ot the FreeBSD developers as
> a team or as individuals.
> 
> What do you all think is the best way to document this, in an attempt to
> stop all this bitching about our logo that periodically comes up at the
> lists?
>

Well the word "daemon" and the "deamon image" in Unix world has nothing
to do with the judeo-christian demon definition.  This is where people
(complaining) are wrong.  It comes from the old greek and roman
definition which talks about a divinity with power/knowledge but not
necessary evil and most of time friendly (close to what some people call
guardian angel).  That image of friendly guardian above mortal men has
been used in the idea of daemon process (Disk And Exexution MONitor).
Since *BSD use a lot of these "daemons", people used little friendly imps
as logo cause they thought it was the best way to describe this old
divinity (daemon), but once again these little characters have nothing
to do with judeo-christian culture.

Maybe if someone could clean, rewrite in better english my words above,
it'd be a start of "explaination."
But I don't think we should document that... it's my opinion...
If people are not able to do the difference between a logo/drawing
without any religious signification and religion, it's their problem.

Marc