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Beastie is the BSD daemon ("Beastie", "BSD", geddit, huh, geddit? Hahaha!), in the Berkeley Software Distribution flavour of Unices. It's the mascot of the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects, but not of OpenBSD — they have their own mascot, Puffy the blowfish. It's ostensibly also not the mascot of Darwin, the MacOS X kernel. I've often wondered why MacOS X won't use its BSD free software origins as part of its advertising. Hexley the platypus is Darwin's mascot instead.
At any rate, you've probably seen Beastie elsewhere, for it's a popular character, and it was years before I personally realised that it was related to BSD. Why a daemon, you might ask? Well, in Unix-like systems (this includes GNU/Linux) useful programs that sit in the background doing housekeeping tasks or that lay dormant waiting for an event to wake them up so they can do something useful are called daemons, spelled with Greek spelling to de-emphasise the Christian interpretation of demon. In Greek mythology, daemons are minor gods who help the gods (i.e. root) accomplish things. Despite the un-Christian spelling, Beastie is drawn to resemble a stereotypical Christian demon, since that's the imagery we're most familiar with.
In conferences and showcases, often booth babes such as Ceren Ercen will dress up as Devilette, who is considered Beastie's more feminine side.
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