[Biojava-l] Java(TM)

[mark.schreiber at novartis.com]

Hi -

This issue has been mentioned before however we have never been instructed 
by Sun to modify the name. This doesn't mean it cannot happen, however 
several people in Sun know about the project (Joshua Bloch apparently even 
mentioned it in a talk) and it has been featured in news stories on their 
own websites. Sun even provided open-bio with some servers and I think 
have shipped biojava on some machines that are 'prepackaged' with bio 
applications.

All of this doesn't prevent them from asking us to change the name and 
they are infact legally within their rights to request it. While it may 
not be possible to own the word Java due to the large Island already 
having the same name it is possible to register it for trade in 
computation related activities. Given that open-bio is not likely to want 
to get into litigation with Sun then I suspect we would need to change the 
name. The most problematic part would be modifying package names. 

Perhaps we (meaning open-bio collectively and the biojava core people) 
could attempt to pre-empt this a little by talking with Sun directly to 
see what our options are. Any thoughts?

- Mark

Mark Schreiber
Research Investigator (Bioinformatics)

Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD)
10 Biopolis Road
#05-01 Chromos
Singapore 138670
www.nitd.novartis.com
www.dengueinfo.org

phone +65 6722 2973
fax  +65 6722 2910





Andreas Dräger <andreas.draeger at uni-tuebingen.de>
Sent by: biojava-l-bounces at lists.open-bio.org
10/13/2006 03:56 PM

 
        To:     biojava-l at biojava.org
        cc:     (bcc: Mark Schreiber/GP/Novartis)
        Subject:        [Biojava-l] Java(TM)


Hi all,

Yesterday our institution, the University of Tübingen, Germany, received 
an email from SUN. The email started by saying that SUN is pleased to 
see projects written in their programing language "Java" that we provide 
at our institution. However, they wanted us to rename our Evoulutionary 
Algorithms package "JavaEvA" to something like "JEvA" and our Neural 
Network project "JavaNNS" should also be renamed to something else like 
"JNNS". The reason for this is that SUN owns a trademark on the name 
"Java" and no other institution or company is supposed to use this name 
for its own purposes or software packages, even if this is a non profit 
and/or open source project as JavaEvA and JavaNNS. We might later even 
get a dissuasion letter if we do not follow the instructions in the email.
I do not exactly know how SUN and the BioJava project are connected. 
However, in the worst case someday we could also receive a writing like 
that.
To summarize: we should be aware that possibly the name "BioJava" has to 
be changed to something else like "JBio" or "BioJ" or what ever SUN 
might suggest as soon as they recognize our project. If there is already 
an agreement with SUN about that, I am not well informed and curious to 
know about it. Otherwise you are now informed about what happened to us 
in Tübingen.

Sincerely,
Andreas Dräger

-- 
Dipl.Bioinform. Andreas Dräger
Eberhard Karls University Tübingen
Center for Bioinformatics (ZBIT)
Germany
Phone: +49-7071-29-70436
Fax:   +49-7071-29-5091

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