BSD daemon

The BSD daemon, nicknamed Beastie, is the generic mascot of BSD operating systems.

The BSD daemon is named after software daemons, a class of long-running computer programs in Unix-like operating systems, which through a play on words takes the cartoon shape of a mythical demon. The BSD daemon's nickname Beastie is a slurred phonetic pronunciation of BSD. Beastie customarily carries a trident to symbolize a software daemon's forking of processes. The FreeBSD web site has noted Evi Nemeth's 1988 remarks about cultural-historical daemons in the Unix System Administration Handbook: "The ancient Greeks' concept of a 'personal daemon' was similar to the modern concept of a 'guardian angel' ...As a rule, UNIX systems seem to be infested with both daemons and demons."

The copyright of the official BSD daemon images is held by Marshall Kirk McKusick (a very early BSD developer who worked with Bill Joy). He 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)." 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 gotten this kind of permission).

McKusick has 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."

In a request to use a license such as Creative Commons, McKusick replied:

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