Simon Frankau's blog
The Internet's Memory and Nix's Logo
Sometimes, the longevity of the Internet's memory (or lack thereof). I have a soft spot for the Nix logo, and occasionally see it crop up in weirdly hacked-up ways, which'll send me down memory lane.
The Internet will very clearly tell you the logo was designed by Tim Cuthbertson. What the internet isn't so good at is telling you is that I designed the previous iteration of the snowflake (originally for the Haskell logo competition - they rather nicely repurposed it).
You can piece this together, from the Haskell wiki, the FAQ and a Nix blog entry from 2009, but it's not particularly obvious.
I do think it's pretty fair to simply credit the new logo to Tim Cuthbertson - it's clearly a significant iteration (and improvement!) on the original, and I wouldn't want to muddy the waters around a key piece of IP of a major project. What does surprise me, though, is just the way that the Internet as a whole degrades non-current information. I'd assumed that if I ever wanted to assert "I originated the Nix lambda-snowflake logo", that this wouldn't be hard to prove, and yet it's really not obvious any more!
Posted 2023-11-17.