On 16 December 2015, Chet Ramey, the maintainer of GNU Bash announced an excited piece of news, that of new logo proposals for GNU Bash. The historic Bash logo seen on the left was taken from tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/bashtop.html.

Depending on the number of votes from the community, one of the below designs could soon sport GNU Bash.

Unfolding the story behind the Bash logo designs

I had this chat with Justin Dorfman, Director of Developer Relations at MaxCDN, who had the idea of the GNU Bash logo redesign. As Justin explains, MaxCDN encourages its staff to contribute to Open Source in various ways.

Now, Justin is a huge fan of Bash, he adores stickers and realizing that GNU Bash doesn’t have an attractive logo, he wrote to Chet Ramey in September asking whether he would be okay with MaxCDN sponsoring a logo redesign. Chet showed the green light and Justin also obtained approval for resources from MaxCDN.

Justin says ProspectOne, the company behind jsDelivr and another freelancer were hired for the task. When the proposals were sent to Chet, he chose three designs by ProspectOne but could not further decide which one to select. Therefore they decided to let the final choice be that of the community and Chet sent the announcement on the bug-bash mailing list.

On the first day ~200 votes were recorded. A user by the name ‘anlar’ then posted about voting for the new bash logo on Reddit, which garnered 160 comments. At the time of writing this post over 12,000 votes were recorded, with logo no. 2 earning 79.3% of the votes.

I thank Justin who provided me an insight of the story behind the new Bash logo. Below are some of the designs that were among the initial proposals.

Is the final GNU Bash logo decided yet? Nah, voting ends on 24 December 2015. You still have time to vote for your favorite. Please visit the page and cast your vote now.