Question

The logo is obviously a dodo, not a duck. But why? Is there a hilarious story behind it?

Answer 1

We were looking for a good mascot for Kiln, but unfortunately, all of the animals that we consulted were already in exclusive contracts with other products except for Strigiphilus garylarsoni and the inverted flame-weasel, neither of which we felt represented our product well.

Late one night in the Kiln alpha period, I was hacking around the Mercurial integration, messed up, and suddenly realized that issuing hg up held the repository at its current version, but moved time itself to match that of the requested revision. In other words, I had unintentionally made a time machine out of Mercurial. After riding a dinosaur for awhile, it hit me that I suddenly had a chance to get Kiln a legitimate mascot.

I thought about where and when to go, then promptly hg upped to the mid 1600s. I went to the island of Mauritius, and approached the dodo bird. I explained that, through no fault of the poor bird, it was about to go extinct. But I had an option: I could hg revert the thing back into the present, restoring it from extinction, if only it'd be willing to sign an exclusive marketing contract for Kiln. We negotiated a little bit back and forth, but at the end of the day, as you can see, the dodo happily agreed. It now lives a life of luxury, and has even taken up recently to hanging around kiwi birds an awful lot. We fully expect it to buy a summer home in New Zealand in the near future.

Unfortunately, the current version of Kiln can only restore deleted files, not deleted species, but we still think the dodo—a peaceful bird with no natural enemies, restored to the present—makes a nice mascot.

Answer 2

Just to let you - apparently they are extremely delicious...