[Biojava-l] Java(TM)

[Andreas Dräger]

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