[glug-t] Animals and Free software!

Quoting hari shyam <harishyam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> i wore the t-shirt and went to my friend's house. he asked whether this group
> related to any animal protecting group!! by seeing the logo. My  doubt is why
> they adopted this logo?

The mascot/logo is derived from the projects name - GNU. The word 'gnu' in the 
english language is the name for a south african antelope. So the question 
boils down to how did the project get the name GNU?

Quoting from Stallman's speech at the Madras Institute of Technology on 13 
March, 2002

"""so the design decisions were made so all that we needed was a name.
well, we hackers, generally look for funny or mischievous names because
think of people being amused by the name is half the fun of writing the
program. so we also had a hacker tradition when you are writing a
program thats similar to some existing program which is something we
often had to do back before the days of portable programming. you know
there was an existing program for some other computer system and you
wanted something like it you had to write another one. so when you were
doing that, writing a program similar to an existing one, you could give
it a name that was a "recursive acronym". which said "This program is
not that one". so there were many TECO text editors. and they were
generally called something or the other TECO. but one hacker called his
program TINT for TINT Is Not TECO. The first recursive acronym. well, we
thought that was so much fun, we started making more. In 1975 I
developed the first EMACS text editor.  The programmable, extensible
display editor. and there were many imitations of EMACS and some were
called something or the other EMACS.  but one was called FINE. for FINE
Is Not EMACS. and there was SINE for SINE Is Not EMACS. and EINE for
EINE Is Not EMACS. and MINCE for Mince Is Not Complete Emacs. and then
EINE was almost completely rewritten by not quite and the new version
was called SWEI for Swie Was EINE Initially.  [Laughter]. 

So I decided to look for a recursive for 'Something Is Not Unix'.because
I didn't have any cleverer idea. so I tried the obvious four letter
approach and I discovered that none of them was a word. They didn't seem
funny. so I tried a contraction so I could make a three letter acronym.
I started substituting letters. ANU, BNU, CNU, DNU, ENU, FNU, GNU!. well
GNU is the funniest word in the english language... so that had to be
it. Now why is the word GNU used for so many jokes? The Reason is
according to the dictionary the 'G' is silent.  so its sounds like
'New'.  so infact when people were asking the question "whats GNU?" long
before there was a GNU system. But now it has a new answer when someone
asks you "Whats GNU?" you can answer 'GNUs Not Unix'. And look at this
you see it sounds like you are being obnoxious telling the person what
it is not instead of what it is. But infact you are giving the one and
only correct answer  [Laughter] .  Anyway when its the name of our
Operating System please pronounce a hard 'G' pronounce it 'gah-nu'. If
you talk operating the 'new' operating system you would get people very
confused.  You see we've working on it for 18 years now so its not new
anymore!  [Laughter] but its still is and always will be 'Gah-NU' no
matter how many call it Linux by mistake."""


There are many free software projects that use animal names or mascots. May be 
there is some mysterious connection between between animals and free 
software!!! 

A small list of free software/organisations associated with animals, I could 
think of...

Linux - Penguin
Gimp - Wilbur(is that a wolf or fox?)
KDE - Kandalf, Some funny Dragon...
Mozilla - Godzilla?
Lush - Frog
OpenOffice - Butterfly(or is that for StarOffice)
Gnome's Component Model - Bonobo(thats some kind of monkey)
Python
Perl - I am not sure, if the perl community associates it with an oyster!
Emacs - Gnu again
Vi emulator for Emacs - Viper
Anaconda, the RedHat Installer
Suse - Chamleon - Some choice!
Sawfish 
Ximian - Some Monkey
Bison, parser generator


Vijay

-- 
Free the Code,
Free the User.

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