Inferno is a compact operating system designed for building distributed and networked systems on a wide variety of devices and platforms. With many advanced and unique features, Inferno puts an unrivalled set of tools into your hands. It runs in hosted mode for: Windows (Nt, 2000, XP), FreeBSD (x86), Irix (mips), Linux (x86), MacOSX (PPC), Solaris (sparc), and Plan 9.
the native environment for inferno?
The word “Inferno” has been a registered trademark for many years in the film industry for the highend compositing software owned and licensed by Discreet. Since this is about software I believe Discreet would have something to say about this developer using a registered trademark name.
http://www4.discreet.com/inferno/
Inferno was developed by Bell Labs (AT&T/Lucent/BellCore), and sold off to Vita Nuova. Inferno’s been around for a while. I would imagine that there would have already been a legal altercation, if there was going to be one.
“The word “Inferno” has been a registered trademark for many years in the film industry for the highend compositing software owned and licensed by Discreet. Since this is about software I believe Discreet would have something to say about this developer using a registered trademark name. ”
trademarks dont apply across all industries in many parts ofthe world. i think its valid
No, Plan 9 is not the native environment for Inferno. It’s just one of the hosted environments, like Linux, Windows XP etc. The native environment is Inferno on bare metal. The fact that Inferno evolved from Plan 9 does not change this.
If Inferno runs even on 1MB of RAM, why run it over another operating system ? What is the advantage ?
i’ve had a look at inferno when reading an article on slashdot a while ago. it seems to be very interesting, but what i don’t fully understand is: what’s this about a host-os. the host-os’ mentioned don’t run on devices with for example 1 MB of RAM. so the host-operating system isn’t really needed and inferno can really be run on all mentioned architectures?
Well, in the land of the litigious, don’t make assumptions.
The Esso Tiger and Tony coexisted for over 40 years before Kellog’s decided to put the screws to them.
If Inferno OS catches on in a big way, they’d better spend a few bucks on a good legal team.
Inferno is a OS who target small devices, it simple unsuitable for desktop use, so, don’t make sense to run it native on a desktop, is a waste of resources.
It just run native on that devices, since it don’t have a native drivers to make him run on a desktop pc, for that, it have the ability to run into a host OS as a user land aplication, to make easy development for that devices.
“The Esso Tiger and Tony coexisted for over 40 years before Kellog’s decided to put the screws to them.”
Good point, but from what I gather, Kellogg only released the sharks after Esso/Exxon opened the convenience stores at service stations. The resemblance between the two popular symbols was of no concern to the cereal maker as long as Exxon only sold petroleum products, but once Exxon started selling foodstuffs, Kellogg apparently felt that they had to take action to remove any suggestion that Tony the Tiger was endorsing other food companies’ products, particularly snack foods and soda etc.
I don’t recall the outcome of the case (apart from the fact that lawyers on both sides made a shipload of moolah), but even if it was unfavourable to Kellogg, they did their part to make it clear to the public that the two tigers (and companies) are not in any way connected. So even if they lose they win, in a weird kind of way.
I think you’re absolutely correct; if Inferno (the OS) catches on, they may well come under the same kind of legal pressure from Discreet. Maybe moreso, given that both Infernos are software products.
I don’t recall the outcome of the case (apart from the fact that lawyers on both sides made a shipload of moolah)
I didn’t know what the purpose of the lawsuit was but I found
a synopsis here: http://www.michbar.org/opinions/us_appeals/2000/040600/6714.html
It seems that Kelloggs lost the decision but it was overturned
on appeal. I don’t believe any money changed hands; Exxon had to respect the limitations imposed on the use of their cartoon tiger.
I think that software projects should be a lot more careful when choosing names. Look what happened with Mozilla Firebird.
Another project that may find itself in trouble is Redhat’s Fedora. The name has been used by an OpenSource project written by Cornell’s Digital Library Research group for several years.
http://www.fedora.info
Has anybody ported Quake to it?
Cornell’s project is an abbreviation, while RedHat’s is not. I wonder when this trademark nonsense (mandrake, inferno, lindows, etc.) will end, so that people can concentrate on writing software instead of mortgaging their house to pay for a lawyer.
Inferno 4 is not yet released.
In fact, there was a story on OSNews not two weeks ago about the last preview release of Inferno 4.
There was no announcement on the mailist, and no change on the VN website.
I could be wrong.
HTH
Rob Pike, Dennis Ritche, Brian Kerigan and Ken Thompson (the UNIX team at Bell Labs) were all involved in the design of Inferno, which could be called “Plan 9 version 2” or better yet “UNIX version 3”.
The name “Inferno” came from Dante’s Inferno. The virtual machine on Inferno is called “Dis”, and it uses a communications protocol named “Styx”, and uses a native programming language is named “Limbo”.
So before the greedy lawyers get involved or Discreet claims ownership of the name Inferno, they might want to read where all these names came from; blame it on Dante Alighighi … abandon all hope, all you who enter.
since it runs on many host os’s why didn’t they made plugin for mozilla insead of IE plugin?
Inferno seems to be targetted at two problems. One is as an OS for soft real-time, embedded applications (the native kernel).
In contrast, the hosted version is good to write heterogenous distributed systems, like grid computing or CORBA, only (IMHO) much simpler. Of course, this can be done with the native version too, but then you’ve got to write drivers for all those devices (see the Linux kernel for an example of how much work this is).
What? I thought that Tony and the Esso tiger were brothers!
“blame it on Dante Alighighi … abandon all hope, all you who enter.”
Ehm, he was Dante Alighieri…
“Cornell’s project is an abbreviation, while RedHat’s is not.”
I doubt that will make much difference; on the fedora.info page, the name at the top of the page is The Fedora™ project.
If they have a trademark on Fedora, Redhat will probably have to change their project’s name if it goes to court.
Actually, the origin of the name is immaterial; it boils down to who had first use of it. That’s why Apple Computer was initially sued by the Beatles’ record label (Apple).
Since both products; the “Inferno” operating system and Discreet “inferno” are Registered Trademarks of their respective owners (Vita Nuova Holdings Limited, and Autodesk Inc.), what’s the babble all about?