So in response to the fact that SGI has no plans for IRIX as of 2013 December I went ahead and drafted a letter to their CEO. I have copied the letter below. And no, I'm not mentioning the GPL. I'd rather it stay proprietary than be GPL'd, so only permissive software licenses are mentioned here:
$DATE
$NAME
$ADDRESS
Attn: Mr. Jorge Titinger
I am writing to you today as a fan, user and supporter of the discontinued product line, IRIX, to propose the act of you and your company Silicon Graphics International would be to opening the source code of IRIX to the community under a permissive software license.
As your company is no longer vending or supporting IRIX as of December 2013 and have ceased development of it prior to this in 2006 of the product, the IRIX fans like me and those of fan sites such as NekoChan.net are facing some issues with use of the product as it ages and lags behind other UNIX variants. As it appears Silicon Graphics International has no further commercial plans for the product, me and several others of the community would love to see IRIX released under a permissive software license such as the MIT, BSD 2-clause or ISC license so we may continue development as a community. I do understand as the CEO and President of SGI you do not directly deal with this matter, but other members of the community have consistently asked your support and sales department with no success, due to a lack of power in those areas.
Releasing the code to IRIX would be a beneficial move for your company, especially under a permissive software license, as this means the community would update and add code, and your company would be free to incorporate that code into proprietary solutions where releasing the code otherwise would be impractical or bad for business. In addition the decision would make headlines across news sites where UNIX fans gather, and would generate attention for your company in a positive manner.
In conclusion I ask that you please consider this matter carefully, and hopefully, you will help make it happen for the community. Thank you for your time and attention while reviewing this letter.
Kind Regards,
$SIGNATURE
$NAME