Of the many thousands of things we have Linus Torvalds to thank for, one of them is the venerable penguin, symbol of all things Linux. But what if Linus had chosen to instead use the Gnu, or a beaver, or a bear, or maybe a demon like Freebsd uses?

What would that relay to the world at large? Well, if he had chosen to go with a character like the FreeBSD "Daemon" mascot, ~80% of the world would have avoided us like the plague, saying we're a bunch of Satan worshiping geeks or something.

rest here