They've had an association with camels, stemming from O'Reilly's first book about the language, Programming Perl, with a camel on the cover. And that's trademarked.
The Perl Foundation sidesteps it by having a logo of a (pearl) onion, which is also useless because nobody associates with Perl with onions.
So this is perhaps a third way - it's a camel, it's not the camel that might cause confusion with O'Reilly's book.
> The Perl Foundation sidesteps it by having a logo of a (pearl) onion, which is also useless because nobody associates with Perl with onions.
The onion has been a metaphor for Perl for a couple of decades now. It was in the Camel Book, though I am not sure it was in the first edition. Larry Wall’s annual talk was (is? I stopped following) the State of the Onion. See for example
This is exactly right. We can't use a camel on a book about Perl, but we can use our own version of a camel otherwise. However, there are a number of camels floating around and it would be great if we could all standardize on the same thing. This is an attempt to do that. We will see how it works out.
They've had an association with camels, stemming from O'Reilly's first book about the language, Programming Perl, with a camel on the cover. And that's trademarked.
The Perl Foundation sidesteps it by having a logo of a (pearl) onion, which is also useless because nobody associates with Perl with onions.
So this is perhaps a third way - it's a camel, it's not the camel that might cause confusion with O'Reilly's book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name_and_logos