GCC Logo

[Colin Douglas Howell]

> Dear Sirs
> 
> I like "new look" of your logo but...your cow (or bull?) looks rather
> undernourished, genetically underpriviliged (er the horns), humble, hopeful
> and looking for a handout. Whether you believe in "feng shui" or Chinese
> Geomancy - I may suggest that you adopt a more aggressive, stronger,
> optimistic bull as your mascot. We need a more positive forward looking
> leadership oriented bull.
> 
> Just my opinion. No offense meant.
> 
> P/S I am trying to switch to Linux and am still finding my way around.
> 
> Regards

Heh.  As David Miller already replied, the mascot is a gnu, not a bull.
A gnu, also called a wildebeest, is a really weird-looking antelope that
lives in southern and eastern Africa.  But your description sounds like a
pretty accurate characterization of how these animals look.  It gave me a
chuckle.  :-)

(By the way, though gnus look humble, they are also extremely numerous, so they
must be doing something right.  Seems like a good omen for a mascot.)

For some pictures of these animals and information on them, try the following
Google searches:

http://images.google.com/images?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&q=wildebeest+gnu&sa=N&tab=wi

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&q=wildebeest+gnu

As for why the GNU project chose to name itself after such an animal, Richard
Stallman writes:

'I chose to make the system compatible with Unix so that it would be portable,
and so that Unix users could easily switch to it.  The name GNU was chosen
following a hacker tradition, as a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix."'

The following page has a more detailed history of the GNU project:

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html