[Fascia]

To keep a trademark, it must "continue to be used in commerce". I think just about everything SGI short of the initialism itself could be argued to be irrelevant to commerce. I doubt HPE would expend the legal costs to defend an abandoned trademark for a technology remembered by a select few. Then again, some companies have more money than sense, and that frequently applies to HP.

[Raion]

Yeah, it's abandoned, just waiting for it to be registered dead in the PTO - that should be happening soon. I could challenge it in court, but what good would come of that except shitloads of money?

[jan-jaap]

Some SGI trademarks are dead. Just waiting for the USPTO to burnout the "IRIX" trademark, so I can trade mark it for myself.

I would intend to allow the community to easily apply for licenses. Anything non-commercial would be free and anything commercial would be at reasonable rates, negotiated so that everybody is happy.

At least that is if somebody else doesn't snap it up first.

I'm not a lawyer, but:

The "IRIX" trademarks gives SGI (or whoever owns it now) the exclusive rights to market a "computer software, namely, operating system software, and instructional manuals sold therewith" named IRIX. Apparently someone else has an "IRIX" trademark for ladies hats.

Once the trademark expires, you'd be able to market your own OS named IRIX. If you'd claim the trademark, you could block others, including HPE, from doing the same thing.

But the IRIX OS we all know is also covered by copyright for many years to come, so you'd have zero rights to distribute *that*, let alone issue licenses for it.

archive.org seems to get away with distributing copyrighted software no longer supported by it's maker ("abandonware"), maybe we should all upload our disc images and settle for that.

[vishnu]

I'd have to say given the ease with which That One Guy on ebay has been selling IRIX preinstalled on SCSI disks, for at least 15 years that I know of, the likelihood of HP/SGI ever putting up a stink about it has to be hovering at right about zero. Obviously, the fact that they're not doing anything doesn't make it any the less illegal.

Just as is the case for the rather large collection of formerly super-expensive commercial software for IRIX that's been showing up on archive.org...

[Raion]

I think that was Acronym - who died recently.

[vishnu]

Oh wow, really? Do you have a link to his ebay store? If it's not been taken down that is. Was he Acronym at nekochan?

Just looked on ebay and now there's a lens maker branding their stuff as "IRIX"... 0_o

[bjames]

Some members found out about Jeff's passing by noticing the eBay Acronym store being shut down and all listings removed.

[Gamefan]

How very sad.

[swarmik]

I'd have to say given the ease with which That One Guy on ebay has been selling IRIX preinstalled on SCSI disks, for at least 15 years that I know of, the likelihood of HP/SGI ever putting up a stink about it has to be hovering at right about zero. Obviously, the fact that they're not doing anything doesn't make it any the less illegal.

Some of the people, who joined HPE after buying SGI, worked in SGI also during the IRIX era. Based on those I've met, they are very supportive and happy when somebody is keeping these old IRIX machines alive (that's how I got some of my workstation and many CDs). I don't expect any legal action initiated by these employees.

Anybody else in HPE does not care about anything related to the IRIX era. They usually don't even know what IRIX is. I asked multiple times for some IRIX-related resources but all my questions ended up in /dev/null...

So the "zero f*cks given" attitude is not surprising to me.

[Raion]

It's a shame they shredded everything back in 2010. There may be some digital copies around or some that were rescued, but the CTO Goh was a total cocksucker in how he did it in secret.