Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

Tux lights them off!

Today Cesar Brod, a friend of mine from Brazil, sent me a picture of some fireworks he saw on New Year's Day that had a picture of our favorite penguin on them. It was timely, since it was a year ago today that I wrote another blog entry about Tux and "Penguin Awareness Day" (January 20th) and "World Penguin Day" (April 25th), so today I thought I would remind people of these two magnificent opportunities to help celebrate the existence of Linux while I passed along this picture from Cesar.

Apparently graphics artists around the world look to the Internet when asked by their clients to supply a picture of a penguin. And naturally our cute and cuddly "Tux" shows up as a major part of the images returned from any search.

Also important for graphics art re-use is that the license for the use of the original image of Tux is very liberal, with Larry Ewing, the copyright holder, giving people permission to use the image as long as the user acknowledges him as the author and the GIMP as the creator of the image "if someone asks". The last phrase is probably enough to give most lawyers shivers, but it has allowed Tux to show up in the original unmodified form in areas as diverse as Plumbing supply trucks, air-conditioning repair services, lottery tickets and fireworks.

Of course Wikipedia has an extensive listing on Tux, so I will not go into all of the history behind him, but I do want to pass on one story:

When Tux made his first appearance in 1996 I was at a trade show, and a friend of mine who ran a Linux business selling distributions, T-shirts, and other Linux "things" came up to me and declared his disgust with the choice. I asked him why he did not like it, and he said that Tux was "fat and silly looking" and that we should have had as a mascot a tiger or shark, something with teeth and fangs to rip Microsoft apart.
I thought about this a minute, and told him that I had worked for a computer company for sixteen years, and one thing that I had learned in that time is if the architect of the software likes something, and if the customers liked something, it did not make a bit of difference what you personally liked. He looked at me strangely, and went away.

Three months later we were at another trade show, and he came up to me waving some small penguin dolls, each progressively closer to looking like the one drawn by Larry Ewing. "Tux bumper stickers are flying off the shelf, Tux T-shirts are flying off the shelf, and I am getting this Chinese toy factory to make a plush Tux doll...", he gushed. I did not remind him that only three months before he had hated the penguin and wanted a shark.

After that, of course, plush Tux penguin dolls started appearing everywhere. I was at CeBIT in Hanover Germany in 1998, and in the SAP booth they had a Volkswagen "New Beetle" in their booth, complete with three penguins in the front seat of the car. One large penguin was "driving" with two small penguins in the passenger's seat. A major political figure of Germany showed up at the booth to help open the fair, and just as the TV Cameras were starting to roll, he said "Why are the penguins in the car?" So while the news people were taping the event for the evening news, the SAP people were trying to explain about Linux and Free Software and the political figure (was it the Chancellor...I can not remember) just kept saying "Yes, I know about Free Software, but why the penguins?")

I laughed all the way back to my booth.

At the end of the show, I had a series of very beautiful women come running up to my stand asking "Please, could they have one of those cute, cuddly penguins?" Unfortunately by that time we were out of penguins, but I had a hard time believing that this would happen if the community had picked a shark as a mascot.

So please remember to appreciate penguins on January 20th, April 25th and throughout the year.

Carpe Penguin!

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