This reminds me of when jQuery had a cartoon ninja on their homepage. Am I seriously looking at a page targeted at grown adults with a talking butterfly on it?
I believe many others feel differently, but personally, I find the Go mascot a bit scary. Dunno the reason, but it's something that I can't easily get used when reading the articles on Go.
FWIW, Russ Cox's GitHub icon[1] is similarly scary to me.
I've never been a fan of "creepy pervert gerbil" either. I wasn't familiar with Russ's even creepier rabbit-thing, but now the gerbil makes more sense.
Well, since the gopher images are Creative Commons Attributions 3.0 licensed[1], you could make your own and sell them or give them away if you wanted. I think the point is to promote the language, not to monetize it, and making it available through the Google merchandise store was probably easiest for those involved.
Probably not, you can legally stick a TM symbol on just about anything without submitting any paperwork. There's a joke that TM stands for Totally Meaningless because it offers zero protection.
Yeah, if memory serves you have to have a registered trademark (the kind that gives you the circled "R") to have any real protection.
I think the plain TM might help you if it is published on paper (like in some well-known dated publication) and you are later fighting someone else for the registered trademark, but it might be only slightly better than no help whatsoever.