in reply to New mascot for Perl

It seems like it might be a good idea to come up with a free and open mascot for Perl

Yes, it seems that way, doesn't it... But as Abigail pointed out, who will bell the cat, and how?

If it were as simple as just coming up with an idea, we'd be done already -- "hey, let's use a drawing of a pearl inside an oyster," and it's over.

But coming up with something that everyone is going to adopt requires more social engineering than a bunch of people randomly spouting ideas.

Short of that, use the camel, with the constraints that exist, or just write things in text and leave the visual associations up to people's imaginations.

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Re: Re: New mascot for Perl
by tilly (Archbishop) on May 14, 2004 at 20:51 UTC
    And the critical point is, who will bell the cat, and how?

    Remember, the association between a camel and Perl is trademarked by O'Reilly, and used in several of their books. It is clearly not in O'Reilly's interests to dilute the value of that trademark by including any alternate image that other publishers can copy. Therefore it will be very difficult to convince O'Reilly to give prominent placement to any symbol other than the camel.

    It is amazing how smart people and companies will avoid shooting their own feet, no matter how politely you ask.

    I should further note that O'Reilly's position in the Perl world was not accidental. In the mid-90's O'Reilly saw that Perl was an opportunity that was big enough to be really interested, but small enough that they conceivably could dominate that market. I know this because I've seen an internal newsletter from back then where Tim explained their decision to go into Perl in a big way. Among other things, O'Reilly hired Larry Wall for several years, were critical to making the One Perl effort work, started (and sponsored!) various conferences on Perl and open source, and came out with a whole series of top-notch books on Perl.

    Perl received a lot from this effort. O'Reilly did as well, and their recognizable Camel brand is a large part of it. It took them time and money to establish that brand, and I find it hard to believe that they would voluntarily help weaken it.

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Re: Re: New mascot for Perl
by chanio (Priest) on May 14, 2004 at 04:27 UTC
    a black perl in an oyster - birth of Venus and the Tiphoons - the sperm of a dead father - etc.

    In Graphic dessign they use to do a BrainStorming - just like a thread where people propose ideas.

    To do a brainstorming, people should put some words as a title, perhaps inside some [ ]. Then someone collects them and obtains another word resulting from merging a sequential pair of them. Finally, a certain monster should emerge from these mergings. The previous 'corpus' of words might help in building the context of the resulting image. It is some sort of funny working.

    The most difficult part is finding a graphical symbol for this image. It should support different formats and sizes. Study where it should be needed and how it should be displayed.

    Finally, some finished proposals should be submitted for everybody to vote for the most attractive one.

    '{\('v')/}
    _`(___)' __________________________
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Re: Re: New mascot for Perl
by melora (Scribe) on May 14, 2004 at 17:55 UTC
    I like the pearl-in-an-oyster idea. The oyster gets an irritant inside it and coats it with nacre so it won't be such a pain -- rather like perl helps get rid of irritants.
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