[656] in Moira
Re: Discuss, Hesiod, Moira, & Athena are registered trademarks of MIT
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Cecilia d'Oliveira)
Fri Sep 24 14:50:21 1993
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 93 17:26:19
From: cec@MIT.EDU (Cecilia d'Oliveira)
To: moira@MIT.EDU, hesiod@MIT.EDU, watchmakers@MIT.EDU, discuss@MIT.EDU
MIT has asserted trademark on these names for years. All we've done
recently is to formally register them with the US Patent and Trademark
Office. We do not intend to do anything differently as a result of this
formal registration. For example, we do not intend to prevent outsiders
>from using the technologies. We do not intend to start licensing these
technologies. If a vendor wants to use MIT's trademarks as part of their
product name (e.g. Netware with Kerberos) they will need to obtain
permission from MIT. And if the MIT trademarks are referenced in
documentation then MIT's ownership of the trademark will need to be
acknowledged. All we are trying to do is to prevent the usurption of these
names by others.
With regard to the question of software releases of these tools from MIT,
we have not released recent versions of our software in several years
primarily because this has not been a priority for us. We'd like to take
more of a leadership role in promoting our technologies to the outside
world but we just don't have the resources to do this. Even putting up our
latest software for external release takes time and we haven't felt we
had the people to devote to what might be expected in terms of packaging,
documentation, etc. For the last three years MIT has focused Athena
efforts on the maintenance and enhancement of Athena services to support
the needs of MIT faculty and students. We operate a large heterogeneous
distributed computing infrastructure here in support of MIT's mission as an
educational and research institution and 6500 people a day use our
services.
Would a minimal effort by MIT to release our latest versions of these tools
on some regular basis (say annually?) be of value? If we can do something
of value to the outside world with a limited amount of work on our part
then we can certainly take a look at this. What we cannot commit to is
something that would take any significant amount of staff time.
Cecilia d'Oliveira
Director, Distributed Computing and Network Services
(includes Athena operations and development)
MIT Information Systems
617-253-0893
