The name
Why “Manguebyte”?
The name comes from Recife, the city in the north-east of Brazil where this project was born.
Recife is built on mangroves, mangue in Portuguese: tidal forests where rivers meet the sea, and one of the most fertile ecosystems on Earth.
In the early 1990s the city was in deep economic trouble, and a group of local musicians answered with a manifesto called Caranguejos com Cérebro, “Crabs with Brains”. Its proposal was to plug the rich, muddy roots of the region’s culture into the global network of ideas. The image they chose was a satellite dish stuck in the mangrove mud.
The movement was called mangue bit: mangue for the mangrove, bit for the unit of digital information. The press heard “beat”, and the world came to know it as manguebeat. Bands such as Chico Science & Nação Zumbi and Mundo Livre S/A mixed maracatu, coco and ciranda with rock, funk, hip-hop and electronic music, and changed Brazilian music for good.
A satellite dish stuck in the mangrove mud.
The name fits in more ways than one
- Mangue
- is where we come from, and it is the home of the crab, which is both the symbol of the movement and, as it happens, the mascot of Rust.
- Byte
- is the bit grown up: eight of them, the unit that software is actually written in. It is our nod to mangue bit, one step further on.
- Music
- It is a music name for a music framework, taken from a movement that was about connecting local roots to global technology. That is what open source does.
So the logo is a crab
A crab with headphones and a guitar: a crab with brains, making noise.