BSD Daemon

The copyright on the official BSD Daemon images is owned by Marshall Kirk McKusick, a very early BSD developer who worked with Bill Joy. McKusick has freely licensed the mascot for individual "personal use within the bounds of good taste (an example of bad taste was a picture of the BSD Daemon blowtorching a Solaris logo)."[2] Any use requires both a copyright notice and attribution.

Reproduction of the daemon in quantity, such as on T-shirts and CDROMs, requires advance permission from McKusick, who restricts its use to implementations having to do with BSD and not as a company logo, although companies with BSD-based products such as Scotgold and Wind River Systems have obtained this kind of permission.

McKusick said that, during the early 1990s, "I almost lost the daemon to a certain large company because I failed to show due diligence in protecting it. So, I've taken due diligence seriously since then."[2]

McKusick explained:

I prefer that the BSD Daemon be used in the context of BSD software. That is the reason that I carefully control my copyright of the BSD Daemon image to ensure that the image is not used inappropriately. I have agreed to allow the small image to appear on Wikipedia but not the larger ones. It is also why I am not going to put a Creative Commons copyright on it.[2]

The BSD Daemon was first drawn in 1976 by comic artist Phil Foglio. Developer Mike O'Brien, who was working as a bonded locksmith at the time, opened a wall safe in Foglio's Chicago apartment after a roommate had "split town" without leaving the combination. In return Foglio agreed to draw T-shirt artwork for O'Brien, who gave him some Polaroid snaps of a PDP-11 system running UNIX along with some notions about visual puns having to do with pipes, demons/daemons, forks, a "bit bucket" named /dev/null, etc.[3] Foglio's drawing showed four happy little red daemon characters carrying tridents and climbing about on (or falling off of) water pipes in front of a caricature of a PDP-11 and was used for the first national UNIX meeting in the US (which was held in Urbana, Illinois). Bell Labs bought dozens of T-shirts featuring this drawing, which subsequently appeared on UNIX T-shirts for about a decade. Usenix purchased the reproduction rights to Foglio's artwork in 1986. His original drawing was then apparently lost, shortly after having been sent to Digital Equipment Corporation for use in an advertisement; all known copies are from photographs of surviving T-shirts.[4]

The BSD Daemon as drawn by John Lasseter, whose take on the BSD mascot first showed up on a book cover in 1988.[5] This image is from Walnut Creek CDROM for FreeBSD 2.0[6]

The later, more popular versions of the BSD Daemon were drawn by animation director John Lasseter beginning with an early greyscale drawing on the cover of the Unix System Manager's Manual published in 1984 by USENIX for 4.2BSD.[7] Its author/editor Sam Leffler (who had been a technical staff member at CSRG) and Lasseter were both employees of Lucasfilm at the time. About four years after this Lasseter drew his widely known take on the BSD Daemon for the cover of McKusick's co-authored 1988 book, The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD Operating System.[8] Lasseter drew a somewhat lesser-known running BSD Daemon for the 4.4BSD version of the book in 1994.

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• List of computing mascots
• Category:Computing mascots
• Tux (mascot), the mascot of Linux kernel
• Konqi, the mascot of KDE
• Glenda, the Plan 9 Bunny, the mascot of Plan 9 from Bell Labs
• Puffy (mascot), the mascot of OpenBSD
• Mozilla (mascot), the mascot of Mozilla Foundation
• Kiki the Cyber Squirrel, the mascot of Krita
• Wilber (mascot), the mascot of GIMP

• Official website
• Photograph of a T-shirt bearing Foglio's original 1976 drawing
• Photograph of a BSD-UNIX/VAX manual showing Lasseter's 1984 drawing
• Photograph of a book cover bearing Lasseter's iconic 1988 drawing
• FreeBSD's The BSD Daemon page
• The red guy's name, from the FreeBSD FAQ
• What's that daemon? — info on daemon shirts and a funny story
• How to make a beastie flag
• BSD Daemon Gallery Archived 2007-09-28 at the Wayback Machine