Recently, someone posted a link to this to a mailing list. This angered a few people, including myself. It is another example of FreeBSD's core going down the crapper. This is only one episode of bowing to PC pressure (see this commit message). Really, any dumbass who is offended by Beastie shouldn't be using FreeBSD anyway, as it would only serve to give the community a bad name.
I'm sick and tired of people foisting their beliefs upon others. Beastie has been synonymous with BSD since 4.2, and diverging from tradition in the name of political correctness should never occur. Some have suggested that the point of this initiative is to distance the FreeBSD Project from Beastie by separating the logo and the name "FreeBSD". Even worse, any new logo submissions will probably either be worse (ala NetBSD) or some New Age everaldo crystal-esque shaded bullshit. If that happened, I would probably fork FreeBSD.
In closing, I urge you to sign the petition to keep the logo exactly as it is. Some say that the point of this is because of the current logo being "ugly". I think it is 99% PC and 1% logo ugliness (as stated in the announcement). And don't give me any of this logo/mascot semantical bullshit. We have a logo. It's in the corner of the FreeBSD page.
Don't destroy FreeBSD.