This image of a demon/devil/satan has a relatively coherent meaning.
What image would that be? If you mean 'the image Christian folks have when they do not realize what the Bible actually says about Satan', then you are trivially right. From the Bible itself, it's a complete mystery where the redness, horns, tail and pitchfork come from. The visual image a Christian should have of Satan, is that of an angel. That Satan looks Good and sounds convincing is essential to his capacity to lead even good Christians astray and is therefore his scariest property.
When you bring those visual characteristics, redness, horns, a tail, a pitchfork, into play, you automatically bring the history of those characteristics with it. In which case the image could also represent some of the playful, naughty daemons in that history[1]. Opposing such images as being Satanic in nature is a display of utter ignorance that we shouldn't bow to. It has nothing to do with daemon processes or nerds.
[1] I must add that, with those associations in mind (the most benign I can think of), I have never understood the choice for this mascot. I feel it doesn't make FreeBSD look serious enough.
Only difference with an angel is that the feather wings are replaced with bat-like wings.
I was going to say that the horns (and goat-legs) came from "demonizing" the Horned God/Pan/etc deities from Paganism. But looking it up (check Wikipedia on Satan, Devil, Pan, Horned God for references), it turns out that this demonization occurred mostly in the late as the early 19th century, while the image of a horned Devil occurs at least as early as the 13th century. Interestingly, the image of The Devil in the early 18th century Tarot of Marseille seems to have branched antlers, not horns.
And that's just a cursory investigation, the complete story is probably much more complicated than that :) There's some stuff involving the Knights Templar vs ancient Pagan imagery, but I'm done with Wikipedia for the moment :-)
The image that they interpret in their minds. Not what it says in the literal Bible, or on Wikipedia.
I'm sure there's a great deal of depth and diversity and religious scholarship on the topic of devils, Satan, etc.
What they all tend to agree is that this figure represents a direct conflict with God. All Christians (and plenty of other major religions) are thus in opposition to it, by definition.
When you bring those visual characteristics, redness, horns, a tail, a pitchfork, into play, you automatically bring the history of those characteristics with it. In which case the image could also represent some of the playful, naughty daemons in that history[1]. Opposing such images as being Satanic in nature is a display of utter ignorance that we shouldn't bow to. It has nothing to do with daemon processes or nerds.
[1] I must add that, with those associations in mind (the most benign I can think of), I have never understood the choice for this mascot. I feel it doesn't make FreeBSD look serious enough.