Time is right for OpenSolaris mascot
Sun Microsystems is hoping its efforts to reinvigorate Solaris will make it a more viable competitor to Linux. But wouldn't it be easier to visualize that competition if the Solaris camp could attack with something more animate than 5 million lines of source code?
Happily, now that Solaris has begun its metamorphosis into the OpenSolaris open-source project, it's possible there could soon be an OpenSolaris mascot to take on Linux's penguin, Tux.
"We did have a conversation on a mascot a couple of months ago, but decided to shelve it till we were open so the larger community could participate in the discussion," said Jim Grisanzio, organizer of the OpenSolaris pilot project, in a note to an OpenSolaris mailing list Tuesday. "Let's see what crops up."
Other open-source operating system mascots that could enter the fray include Beastie, the BSD Daemon, the GNU wildebeest, Hexley the platypus for the open-source Darwin core to Mac OS X, the OpenBSD blowfish, and Geeko, the chameleon some say is named after Suse Linux leader Juergen Geck.
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
