Larry the Cow

Larry is a typographic accident that refused to leave. In 2000 Ethan Dunham of Fonthead Design released a novelty typeface called Font Heads, where each letter is a scribbled face. Around January 2002 Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins put a row of those glyphs on gentoo.org under the caption key members of the Gentoo Linux development team, and one of them was a cow. Users started calling him Larry, and he ended up on the 404 page and beside news posts, which is how a letter of the alphabet became a distro mascot. In November 2004 Matteo Peach Pescarin traced the head from a low resolution bitmap and drew him a body, originally with a bright pink udder, until the forums pointed out that a cow named Larry was probably male; a bug was filed asking whether he should be renamed Larry the Bull, the maintainers resolved it as no action, and the udder quietly disappeared instead. Manuel Nefarius Zwerenz did a color repaint with pink ears and yellow horns. The Gentoo Foundation only got Fonthead's written permission to relicense the original art under CC BY-SA in 2011, nine years after they started using it. Gentoo still calls Larry unofficial, still will not put him on the logo, and still ships emerge --moo.