Mr. Jenkins

The project started at Sun Microsystems as Hudson, named after Angus Hudson, the butler in Upstairs, Downstairs. When Oracle acquired Sun and took the Hudson name with it, Kawaguchi renamed the project Jenkins, the other stock British butler name, and kept the metaphor completely intact. The butler illustration everyone knows came from the agency Frontside, with Charles Lowell championing the design, and it ships under CC BY-SA. That license is why the Jenkins project maintains an artwork catalogue with more than eighty versions of him: a ninja, a superhero, a Frankenstein, a Santa, a pixel art sprite, a Jenkins in a kurta and tilak drawn by the Indian community, a top hatted formal version holding an espresso. He is always drawn from the chest up, eyes shut, mid bow, so every variant is a costume change over a fixed pose. That single constraint is why a set built by dozens of unrelated volunteers still reads as one character.