Georg Jakob jack@unix.sbg.ac.at writes:
Although I the point Alessandro is making about sexism and sterotypes, I do not think a beautiful woman is per se offensive. Hey, she's supposed to be a Godess!
Ohhh, after working with Americans for so long, it's good to be writing amongst a mostly European audience once more, where people aren't afraid of beauty, nudity, jokey stereotyping and/or political incorrectness. Which of those it is depends on how you view the original idea.
But I have to say that I particularily love the Idea of questionizing existing sterotypes and if we found a way of elegantly doing this in our logo ... [...]
There is, of course, the problem that (hopefully) FSFE will be looked to by our neighbours as a parallel to the FSF itself and I don't think many other cultures will "get" what we're trying to do here. I don't know, is that a bad thing? At least it will make it easier to spot our constituents (it's anyone who doesn't find the logo offensive), but how important is any damage to the external image?
a.) The beautiful Godess riding the Gnu is hacking around on a Computer which is also carried by the Gnu. I think a Desktop Workstation is better in this case, because a laptop might look to much like the ads mentioned above.
I think this is crucial and could be quite an important start on putting right what I see as one of the injustices of the first wave of personal computing. I know I'm probably as guilty as the next man, but this field has been far too male-dominated so far.
b.) OK, this one might be tasteless (or not): The beautiful woman is not a woman but a geek rms-like-looking. He/she is wearing a wig and a dress ... I do not particiulary like this, it just came to my mind.
Is it time to go to sleep again already? :-)
Finally, a quick intro: I'm a training academic, writer and employed computer admin who is also on the board of an internet applications developer who puts effort into Free Software projects and doesn't hesitate to reap the fringe benefits of our investments. I woke to Free Software while still using DOS on a small home machine which really wasn't up to running a unix at that time and didn't follow the rest of the herd into Windows 3, moving instead to Linux. Yes, I even helped set up a LUG and am an Emacs user. Scared yet?