I had never heard this story but this could definitely have happened at some point.
My personal memory that this happened because the people there were collecting cones at a high rate to play in the corridor of the floor (the 2H) of the student residence most of the VideoLAN / Via people were occupying at that time. This trend was certainly started by someone who became Debian Project Leader at some point and who was also enjoying eating regularly at a fast food restaurant in town. On their way back, these young and stupid boys were stealing the cones from a nearby gas station and bringing them back.
This lead to various uses such as the creation of an unofficial acrobatic cone launch federation (« la federation internationale de cone ball » I tried to find a picture of a now prominent Google SRE in action but my google-fu escaped me) and various costumes[1].
The cone used as an icon was also illustrating the fact that most of the code was heavily in progress at that time and so definitely not usable.
My personal memory that this happened because the people there were collecting cones at a high rate to play in the corridor of the floor (the 2H) of the student residence most of the VideoLAN / Via people were occupying at that time. This trend was certainly started by someone who became Debian Project Leader at some point and who was also enjoying eating regularly at a fast food restaurant in town. On their way back, these young and stupid boys were stealing the cones from a nearby gas station and bringing them back.
This lead to various uses such as the creation of an unofficial acrobatic cone launch federation (« la federation internationale de cone ball » I tried to find a picture of a now prominent Google SRE in action but my google-fu escaped me) and various costumes[1].
The cone used as an icon was also illustrating the fact that most of the code was heavily in progress at that time and so definitely not usable.
We were young!
1: http://sam.zoy.org/photos/20001011%20-%202H/016%20-%20la%20d...