FreeBSD's mascot

posted on 28th day of November, 2005

FreeBSD is an operating system of the UNIX-variants. Machines run by this operating system are used across the Internet to serve millions of visitors year round. I am sure you accessed some of them. The point here is not advocating a certain operating system but to talk about its mascot.

FreeBSD's mascot has always been the BSD Daemon. The daemon does not have a name officially, but you may call it beastie, which is pronounced "BSD". A daemon, in UNIX terminology, is a program that runs in the background, and usually does not require interactive human intervention to work properly. As soon as a system starts, daemons come into play and begin providing service to local or remote users alike until the system shuts down.

Many would have thought daemons are related to evilness because of its resemblance to the word "demon". This is a common misunderstanding.

"Many people equate the word ``daemon'' with the word ``demon,'' implying some kind of Satanic connection between UNIX and the underworld. This is an egregious misunderstanding. ``Daemon'' is actually a much older form of ``demon''; daemons have no particular bias towards good or evil, but rather serve to help define a person's character or personality. The ancient Greeks' concept of a ``personal daemon'' was similar to the modern concept of a ``guardian angel'' --- ``eudaemonia'' is the state of being helped or protected by a kindly spirit."

- p403 Unix System Administration Handbook

To recap, daemons are like guardian angels, helping, guiding and protecting a particular person. The concept is amazing but yet difficult to be understood by human kind: How can one stay unbiased to guide a particular person to what he/she truly is?

Even daemon as a computer program asks for computing resource such as processor power and memory. It would be unrealistic to expect a human being to serve without him asking for any return. A computer program could starve to death, so do human. Humans do not eat computer memory as food. Rather, we depend on something we desperately desire.