The mascots of free software. A little list

At previous article he had said that Tux was not the first real animal-inspired mascot in the free software world. That honor goes to the wildebeest head of the GNU project.

The mascots of free software. The antelope that started it all

In this case there is no real or imagined story. it is only about the phonetic similarity between the name of the animal and the acronym of the project.

Wildebeest is the popular name for a species of African antelope while GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU is not Unix.

Wildebeest head represents wisdom, communication skills and energy what are the characteristics of the project

On the official page the logo is described as:

A nice head of New with the typical beard and the twisted horns that give it an elegant air. He seems to be smiling satisfied with the work done so far. But, he keeps his eyes fixed on the distance.

The original 1996 version had two redesigns

Firefox

Probably my claim from the previous article that Tux is the most popular mascot in open source is false. Since Firefox is much more popular. although now it is not as used as before, andThat honor is likely to go to the panda who sees himself as a fox.

Originally the browser project that would succeed Netscape was called Phoenix. This seems to be a very popular name in the world of technology since the Apache Foundation has a project of the same name and at the time the browser had to change its name to avoid being confused with existing software.

Coinciding with the original name, the logo was a bird coming out of the fire.

The first alternative that the developers played with was Firebird (firebird), this allowed them to continue using the original pet, a stylized red bird with a friendly face that seemed to come out of the flames.

Finally, when choosing the name of Firefox they chose to use the animal that bore that name in English. It is a carnivorous mammal that currently lives (in danger of extinction in the Himalayas, southern China, India and Bhutan.

The idea of ​​Phoenix (Phoenix) as a project name was taken over by a database engine supported by the Apache Foundation. Your pet is a bird in profile with a flaming tail.

Python

I acknowledge that including Python in this enum is a bit forced as the snakes in the logo cannot even be described as cartoon. Guido Van Rossum, the creator of the language, liked the British comedy group Monty Python and that's why he baptized it with that name. The thing about the snakes is because python is python in English.

Pythons are non-poisonous snakes that kill their prey by constriction.

As a useful information, it can be added that the Python Software Foundation encourages the inclusion of the logo in any project that uses this programming language.

PHP

I don't know if an elephant would have been my first choice for a server-side scripting language used in web design. It does not exactly suggest speed or lightness, But it seems I'm not the only one who can't resist puns. elePHPant, not only is still with us, it also has its own line of stuffed animals and, according to a warning on the official website of the project, there are also fakes.

Pidgin

Pidgin is a chat program that allows you to log into accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. Their logo is a purple dove. Although I couldn't find an explanation, I assume it refers to the racing pigeons.

Docker

At this point in the compilation it becomes clear that. Except for the wildebeest head, the animals chosen for the project logos do not try to convey anything. They are chosen based on name.

This is undoubtedly the case with Moby Dock, a cartoon whale carrying containers of merchandise on its back. It was the chosen choice for what is today the most popular container management platform.

Of course this list is not complete, the SUSE Linux Gecko is missing, the MySQL dolphin and after many of which there will be no lack of opportunity to talk.