Everything will offend someone. This person probably had a bad day and would have complained about something else (and threatened not to stay) if the BSD logo hadn't distracted her first.
Self-censorship to appease the tiny number of people that are crazy is the worst form of censorship. There is no appeals process and you can't measure whether or not your censorship is effective. All you're left with is a world that consists only of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I don't want to live in that world.
Don't change your personality because one person might not like you. Is it worth making the world a worse place just to get a measly thousand bucks?
I think the person who originally designed the page was proud that he was using FreeBSD and he decided that he wanted to share this information with the world. Doing so would make him happy; perhaps he imagined that a FreeBSD user would one day see the logo and enjoy his life a little bit more because he connected, although indirectly, with another in his tribe.
Little decisions like this are what make you human. Don't let your fears and inhibitions turn you into a robot because some interview with Steve Jobs said not to put "powered by..." logos on stuff. Do what feels right in your heart. Enjoy life first and figure out how to make money without compromising your humanity.
Steve Jobs had a separate set of rules that applied to Steve Jobs. Like free-for-all parking at work, everyone's equal... unless you're Steve Jobs, then you get a reserved spot.
It's on a login page, presumably operated by the ISP if they're the ones responsible for the logo content. Under that condition, why should they be prevented from advertising what technology they use? Should they also be forbidden from using their own name?
It wasn't a bad day, it's proselytizing, aka "my belief system is better than yours so I am going to attempt to impose it everywhere because I am better than you".
You've never experienced a door-to-door religion salesperson?
Is it worth making the world a worse place just to get a measly thousand bucks?
I think it depends on whether the person set to net a thousand bucks would agree with you on whether censoring a mascot makes the world a worse place, or whether they think censoring the mascot brings the world, such as it is, into relief.
It may not be that most people would care about the daemon turned devil. But that can be all the more incentive to just do what the vocal minority wants. No one else really cares, and that is as much about making the world a bad place as the person who actively insists on censorship. So why should you make an effort against a disinterested population?
I agree with you, but I think it is important to realize that there are varying degrees of both willfulness and jadedness that can make an argument like "you're selling the world out" fall flat. As much as I find a lack of resistance from people toward the censorship calls of others, apathy and jadedness are far more often the cause than agreeing that something ought to be censored.
Maybe finding a way to convince these apathetic ones that the world isn't beyond redemption would go a long way to convincing people that these things are worth fighting against, but I am still trying to find a reliable and repeatable way to do that. I will always be the seemingly naive optimist I suppose.
Self-censorship to appease the tiny number of people that are crazy is the worst form of censorship. There is no appeals process and you can't measure whether or not your censorship is effective. All you're left with is a world that consists only of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I don't want to live in that world.
Don't change your personality because one person might not like you. Is it worth making the world a worse place just to get a measly thousand bucks?