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Comment by grahamlee | Hacker News Reader

Context for people who weren’t there: Perl was created by Larry Wall, who became an O’Reilly employee. The camel was the unofficial logo because it was the picture (presumably from the Dover pictorial gallery) used for the book Programming Perl co-authored by Wall and published by O’Reilly.

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A little more context: In the Perl 4 days, the book Programming Perl was the official Perl manual; it wasn't until Perl 5 that there was a complete freely distributable digital manual that came with Perl. (This situation was the impetus for Stallman's "Why Free Software Needs Free Documentation" essay)

Where can I learn about the Diver pictorial library? Is it a particular illustrator that is on all the O’Reilly books?

This seems to be it - https://www.doverbooks.co.uk/animals-creatures

I'm not sure I understand the licensing issue - if the camel graphic came from one of these books, would it not be possible to license it direct from the pictorial library (possibly no licensing required, just a royalty free deal from buying the book)?

It seems O'reilly has registered the camel as trademark so you can't sidestep it from sourcing the image somewhere else

The problem is trademark, not copyright. O'Reilly owns the trademark on it in the context of Perl: "The camel with the topic of Perl is a trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc." -- https://www.perl.org/camel.html

The camel picture used on the original book cover is in Animals 1,419 Copyright Free Illustrations of Mammals, Birds, Fish, Insects, etc. by Jim Harter: https://www.doverbooks.co.uk/animals-1419-copyright-free-ill... (image 241).

I learned something today. Cheers!

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