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I knew that Microsoft had to call their ECMAScript implementation JScript, but it never dawned on me that Oracle is the current owner of the "JavaScript" tradem

I knew that Microsoft had to call their ECMAScript implementation JScript, but it never dawned on me that Oracle is the current owner of the "JavaScript" trademark: http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=2416017&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=2416017&caseSearchType=US_... Between this and Oracle's ongoing lawsuit against Google for their use of Java in Android, I have a pretty low opinion of Oracle.

giancarlostoro 8y ago
If I had to explain Oracle to anyone I would only say that their motto is simply "Do all evil."
- tomohawk 8y ago
  At least there's no pretense
- blasdel 8y ago
  It's more accurately "take money" — don't anthropomorphize them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    Heh and adding on to that... "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil"
    - matte_black 8y ago
      But the root of all evil is believing there is only one truth and that you are in possession of it.
      - kitd 8y ago
        Do you truly believe that? Just asking ...
        matte_black 8y ago
        Do you? Seems like it struck a nerve with a lot of people. Not sure what their problem is.
        kitd 8y ago
        I was facetiously trying to point out the irony in your statement. I should have added a ;) .
        julianj 8y ago
        I didn't downvote you, but I believe I understand why folks got upset. It appears that you are taking a passive aggressive dig at all religions because the parent comment referenced a Christian biblical verse (1 Timothy 6:10). While this usually isn't an issue here, the comment appears unrelated to the main conversation and may be seen as trolling. I could be wrong.
        matte_black 8y ago
        I actually didn’t even know that was a biblical verse, how would I? I’m not particularly religious. I figured it was just some other quote people say. My source was straight from German physicist and mathematician Max Born.
        mcguire 8y ago
        Why was that comment flag killed?
        Tiksi 8y ago
        I think the emphasis on `you` made it seem as if you were directly attacking the parent.
  - alanh 8y ago
    what a treat. thanks for sharing this video.
  - hinkley 8y ago
    I could tell two sentences in that was a Brian C quote.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    Ethics is the difference.
    - wiz21c 8y ago
      Yup and the interpretation of law doesn't need to be ethical. Law and justice are quite different things.
- glandium 8y ago
  Bryan Cantrill on Oracle: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2044 https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2044
- userbinator 8y ago
  One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
  - ryanmarsh 8y ago
    His major contribution to society is some entertaining sailboat racing.
    - gowld 8y ago
      More than my contribution.
    - kirrent 8y ago
      Well, it's not like the AC72 and AC50 rules were a lot more popular to certain groups than Oracle is to developers. The AC75 is both a reaction to and rejection of Ellison's vision.
  - poizan42 8y ago
    Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=38m28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=38m28s (quote at 38m28s)
- _o_ 8y ago
  But "Do all evil." is trademarked by google... :D :D :D
- hinkley 8y ago
  I expect one day to learn that Larry Ellison bought that Hawaiian island in order to hunt people for sport. I mean he dresses and grooms himself like the evil alternate universe version of a nice person. And everything I’ve heard is that he’s a horrible manchild.
  - chappi42 8y ago
    Not that I'd have a detailed knowledge about him, but there is: https://givingpledge.org/Pledger.aspx?id=192 https://givingpledge.org/Pledger.aspx?id=192 Something which only few persons choose to do
    - justinclift 8y ago
      With Larry, there's going to be a self interest angle driving it completely. Literally 0 chance of him "doing good". Feel free to dig into the details though if you want. Shouldn't be too hard to figure out where the rot is. :)
      - chappi42 8y ago
        If you have relevant details regarding his giving pledge I'm interested to learn them. But rot, self interest? Not everybody can't do no evil. If he goes through with his pledge (which I assume) he will have done a lot of good. And he will have done it voluntarily. Doesn't make hime a saint, but... (..almost ;-) - i'm joking; btw, did/will Steve Jobs, Larry and Sergey give away such a substancial part of their wealth?)
- eftychis 8y ago
  It does seem they always go for the path that will maximize profits, evil (note not a legal term, but a moral one) and pull everyone down to the bottom with their actions. I am convinced if there was a crossroads with a payout of x dollars for both choices, but with a pretty nasty outcome for the community for choice y as the distinguishing factor, Oracle would pick y in a heartbeat. I think a good description for Oracle is "the demon that pulls everyone down to hell with them..."
  - zaxomi 8y ago
    Manny many years ago, I read a story about Oracle: In a big budget project, they had implemented a report, like sales per month or something similar. The requirement was to sort the result by month. Any sane person would sort it by the order the months happens in a year, like January, February, March, etc... But not Oracle: April, August, December, February, January, July, June, March, May, November, October, September. Technically they are sorted... and they requirements only said sort by month. To get it fixed the customer had to pay Oracle more money, since they changed changed the requirements.
    - snehanshu 8y ago
      Why did they do this?
- amelius 8y ago
  At times they do release some cool new software though, e.g. GraalVM.
aphextron 8y ago
>Between this and Oracle's ongoing lawsuit against Google for their use of Java in Android, I have a pretty low opinion of Oracle. You won't find any argument here
jannes 8y ago
Hmm, so JavaScript was conceived at Netscape in 1995 according to Wikipedia. After the release Sun must have registered the "JavaScript" trademark instead of going after Netscape. Any idea why they did that? Wasn't their inaction risking to lose the entire Java trademark by not defending it against Netscape? Does anyone know more about the history here? What would Google do today if someone named their language DartScript? Or what would Apple do if someone released SwiftScript?
- thristian 8y ago
  Sun was encouraging Netscape to include the JVM in their browser for applets, and generally trying to promote Java as the Next Big Thing. The in-browser scripting language was going to be called "LiveScript", but Sun asked them to change it to "JavaScript" to strengthen the Java brand, and make the syntax more closely resemble C-family languages.
  - bch 8y ago
    Wow - I heard it was called JavaScript to cash in on the familiarity of the name Java, but I didn’t realize it was at the behest of Sun.
    - protomyth 8y ago
      If you look at the Java timeline, the full Java marketing blitz wasn’t in full swing. JavaScript was announced on December 4, 1995 and Java (alpha) was public in March of the same year. A stable Java wasn’t available until 1996. It was more coordinated than riding the coattails.
      - rootlocus 8y ago
        > the full Java marketing blitz wasn’t in full swing Pun unintended I guess, but still funny.
ams6110 8y ago
I always assumed it was because that was Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" era and they didn't want to use the name "Java" but did want to imply that it was compatible. Also at the time, pretty sure that Sun still owned Java?
- mathw 8y ago
  If I recall correctly, it was called JScript because it wasn't actually fully compatible and because it had extended stuff - there was a JScript host for Windows scripting at one point, and there was talk about using it for ASP instead of VBScript. I'm not sure if that was ever actually implemented. Also I suspect Microsoft wanted to have their own branding. Visual J++ on the other hand was because Sun sued them over a Java implementation which wasn't actually compatible with Java, and misuse of the trademark, and all that kind of thing, so Microsoft weren't allowed to call it Java anymore. This ultimately led to the development of C#, so it was probably for the good in the long term, apart from some of the bits they copied from Java in what was presumably an attempt to make it more a direct alternative.
  - amichal 8y ago
    Jscript asp was a real thing. “Run jscript on the client and the sever” was supposed to be a big time/labor saving. Ala nodejs
codetrotter 8y ago
Indeed. When they said: > The unauthorized display of our client's intellectual property is likely to cause consumers encountering this app to mistakenly believe that it emanates from, or is provided under a license from, Oracle. I think most of us would agree that no, literally almost no one familiar with JavaScript would have believed that app to “emanate from, or be provided under a license from, Oracle”. I know that Oracle owns Java, but I never would have guessed that they had any ownership of the JavaScript name. When I think of JS, Oracle is like the last company I would think of. When I think of JS, I think of Brendan Eich, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, web development, Node.js, etc.
- suyash 8y ago
  " When I think of JS, Oracle is like the last company I would think of." - Check out Oracle JET (JavaScript Toolkit), it's an open source library for modern web developers : https://github.com/oracle/oraclejet https://github.com/oracle/oraclejet
  - hmm_really 8y ago
    Which no 'modern' web developer would go anywhere near!
    - boubiyeah 8y ago
      What the hell is this...
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    LOL Google taught everybody a lesson, avoid Oracle products.
  - gargravarr 8y ago
    Wait, Oracle? On GITHUB? Now I have seen everything...
    - Ygg2 8y ago
hyperpallium 8y ago
If you have a pretty low opinion of Oracle just because of that, you don't know much about Oracle.
- mathgladiator 8y ago
  Are you saying the reality is much worse? Or that Oracle has a bright side?
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    The former, Oracle is pretty much the devil of the tech world.
    - eps 8y ago
      A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Those Hawaiian islands aren't cheap, you know...
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Oracle exists mainly to make Microsoft look good.
    - Ygg2 8y ago
      Please, Oracle exist only to make money. Microsoft looking good is just an amusing side effect.
  - suyash 8y ago
    It's one of the market leader in enterprise software and database for decades. Don't be just another hater.
    - fuzzy2 8y ago
      I’ve never heard a developer say good things about Oracle databases though. Being the #1 doesn’t mean you’re right. It just means your ads work.
gk1 8y ago
It’s also the trademark owner of “MySQL”, which I discovered when Google AdWords rejected some of my client’s ads for having “MySQL” in them (the client’s product integrates with the database). I spent weeks and many back-and-forth emails and calls with AdWords support trying to explain that 1) our use of the term is well within Oracle’s guidelines, and 2) no, I am not going to contact Oracle to fill out a permission form for me. It didn’t work. Not even with Level 2 support. Thankfully, AdWords policy enforcement is completely random and nonsensical so I just duplicated the ads several times until one of them did not get flagged.
tastyfreeze 8y ago
You must not have a lot experience with Oracle if you had even a moderately rosy opinion of Oracle. In my experience Oracle products are stupendously overpriced. They have been riding their dot-com boom clout in the hollow husk of a company. The only weapons Oracle has are vendor lock in and crushing competition with litigation.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

If I had to explain Oracle to anyone I would only say that their motto is simply "Do all evil."

tomohawk 8y ago
At least there's no pretense
blasdel 8y ago
It's more accurately "take money" — don't anthropomorphize them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  Heh and adding on to that... "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil"
  - matte_black 8y ago
    But the root of all evil is believing there is only one truth and that you are in possession of it.
    - kitd 8y ago
      Do you truly believe that? Just asking ...
      - matte_black 8y ago
        Do you? Seems like it struck a nerve with a lot of people. Not sure what their problem is.
        kitd 8y ago
        I was facetiously trying to point out the irony in your statement. I should have added a ;) .
        julianj 8y ago
        I didn't downvote you, but I believe I understand why folks got upset. It appears that you are taking a passive aggressive dig at all religions because the parent comment referenced a Christian biblical verse (1 Timothy 6:10). While this usually isn't an issue here, the comment appears unrelated to the main conversation and may be seen as trolling. I could be wrong.
        matte_black 8y ago
        I actually didn’t even know that was a biblical verse, how would I? I’m not particularly religious. I figured it was just some other quote people say. My source was straight from German physicist and mathematician Max Born.
        mcguire 8y ago
        Why was that comment flag killed?
        Tiksi 8y ago
        I think the emphasis on `you` made it seem as if you were directly attacking the parent.
- alanh 8y ago
  what a treat. thanks for sharing this video.
- hinkley 8y ago
  I could tell two sentences in that was a Brian C quote.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Ethics is the difference.
  - wiz21c 8y ago
    Yup and the interpretation of law doesn't need to be ethical. Law and justice are quite different things.
glandium 8y ago
Bryan Cantrill on Oracle: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2044 https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2044
userbinator 8y ago
One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
- ryanmarsh 8y ago
  His major contribution to society is some entertaining sailboat racing.
  - gowld 8y ago
    More than my contribution.
  - kirrent 8y ago
    Well, it's not like the AC72 and AC50 rules were a lot more popular to certain groups than Oracle is to developers. The AC75 is both a reaction to and rejection of Ellison's vision.
- poizan42 8y ago
  Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=38m28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=38m28s (quote at 38m28s)
_o_ 8y ago
But "Do all evil." is trademarked by google... :D :D :D
hinkley 8y ago
I expect one day to learn that Larry Ellison bought that Hawaiian island in order to hunt people for sport. I mean he dresses and grooms himself like the evil alternate universe version of a nice person. And everything I’ve heard is that he’s a horrible manchild.
- chappi42 8y ago
  Not that I'd have a detailed knowledge about him, but there is: https://givingpledge.org/Pledger.aspx?id=192 https://givingpledge.org/Pledger.aspx?id=192 Something which only few persons choose to do
  - justinclift 8y ago
    With Larry, there's going to be a self interest angle driving it completely. Literally 0 chance of him "doing good". Feel free to dig into the details though if you want. Shouldn't be too hard to figure out where the rot is. :)
    - chappi42 8y ago
      If you have relevant details regarding his giving pledge I'm interested to learn them. But rot, self interest? Not everybody can't do no evil. If he goes through with his pledge (which I assume) he will have done a lot of good. And he will have done it voluntarily. Doesn't make hime a saint, but... (..almost ;-) - i'm joking; btw, did/will Steve Jobs, Larry and Sergey give away such a substancial part of their wealth?)
eftychis 8y ago
It does seem they always go for the path that will maximize profits, evil (note not a legal term, but a moral one) and pull everyone down to the bottom with their actions. I am convinced if there was a crossroads with a payout of x dollars for both choices, but with a pretty nasty outcome for the community for choice y as the distinguishing factor, Oracle would pick y in a heartbeat. I think a good description for Oracle is "the demon that pulls everyone down to hell with them..."
- zaxomi 8y ago
  Manny many years ago, I read a story about Oracle: In a big budget project, they had implemented a report, like sales per month or something similar. The requirement was to sort the result by month. Any sane person would sort it by the order the months happens in a year, like January, February, March, etc... But not Oracle: April, August, December, February, January, July, June, March, May, November, October, September. Technically they are sorted... and they requirements only said sort by month. To get it fixed the customer had to pay Oracle more money, since they changed changed the requirements.
  - snehanshu 8y ago
    Why did they do this?
amelius 8y ago
At times they do release some cool new software though, e.g. GraalVM.

aphextron 8y ago

>Between this and Oracle's ongoing lawsuit against Google for their use of Java in Android, I have a pretty low opinion of Oracle. You won't find any argument here

jannes 8y ago

Hmm, so JavaScript was conceived at Netscape in 1995 according to Wikipedia. After the release Sun must have registered the "JavaScript" trademark instead of going after Netscape. Any idea why they did that? Wasn't their inaction risking to lose the entire Java trademark by not defending it against Netscape? Does anyone know more about the history here? What would Google do today if someone named their language DartScript? Or what would Apple do if someone released SwiftScript?

thristian 8y ago
Sun was encouraging Netscape to include the JVM in their browser for applets, and generally trying to promote Java as the Next Big Thing. The in-browser scripting language was going to be called "LiveScript", but Sun asked them to change it to "JavaScript" to strengthen the Java brand, and make the syntax more closely resemble C-family languages.
- bch 8y ago
  Wow - I heard it was called JavaScript to cash in on the familiarity of the name Java, but I didn’t realize it was at the behest of Sun.
  - protomyth 8y ago
    If you look at the Java timeline, the full Java marketing blitz wasn’t in full swing. JavaScript was announced on December 4, 1995 and Java (alpha) was public in March of the same year. A stable Java wasn’t available until 1996. It was more coordinated than riding the coattails.
    - rootlocus 8y ago
      > the full Java marketing blitz wasn’t in full swing Pun unintended I guess, but still funny.

ams6110 8y ago

I always assumed it was because that was Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" era and they didn't want to use the name "Java" but did want to imply that it was compatible. Also at the time, pretty sure that Sun still owned Java?

mathw 8y ago
If I recall correctly, it was called JScript because it wasn't actually fully compatible and because it had extended stuff - there was a JScript host for Windows scripting at one point, and there was talk about using it for ASP instead of VBScript. I'm not sure if that was ever actually implemented. Also I suspect Microsoft wanted to have their own branding. Visual J++ on the other hand was because Sun sued them over a Java implementation which wasn't actually compatible with Java, and misuse of the trademark, and all that kind of thing, so Microsoft weren't allowed to call it Java anymore. This ultimately led to the development of C#, so it was probably for the good in the long term, apart from some of the bits they copied from Java in what was presumably an attempt to make it more a direct alternative.
- amichal 8y ago
  Jscript asp was a real thing. “Run jscript on the client and the sever” was supposed to be a big time/labor saving. Ala nodejs

codetrotter 8y ago

Indeed. When they said: > The unauthorized display of our client's intellectual property is likely to cause consumers encountering this app to mistakenly believe that it emanates from, or is provided under a license from, Oracle. I think most of us would agree that no, literally almost no one familiar with JavaScript would have believed that app to “emanate from, or be provided under a license from, Oracle”. I know that Oracle owns Java, but I never would have guessed that they had any ownership of the JavaScript name. When I think of JS, Oracle is like the last company I would think of. When I think of JS, I think of Brendan Eich, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, web development, Node.js, etc.

suyash 8y ago
" When I think of JS, Oracle is like the last company I would think of." - Check out Oracle JET (JavaScript Toolkit), it's an open source library for modern web developers : https://github.com/oracle/oraclejet https://github.com/oracle/oraclejet
- hmm_really 8y ago
  Which no 'modern' web developer would go anywhere near!
  - boubiyeah 8y ago
    What the hell is this...
- raverbashing 8y ago
  LOL Google taught everybody a lesson, avoid Oracle products.
- gargravarr 8y ago
  Wait, Oracle? On GITHUB? Now I have seen everything...
  - Ygg2 8y ago

hyperpallium 8y ago

If you have a pretty low opinion of Oracle just because of that, you don't know much about Oracle.

mathgladiator 8y ago
Are you saying the reality is much worse? Or that Oracle has a bright side?
- StavrosK 8y ago
  The former, Oracle is pretty much the devil of the tech world.
  - eps 8y ago
    A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Those Hawaiian islands aren't cheap, you know...
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Oracle exists mainly to make Microsoft look good.
  - Ygg2 8y ago
    Please, Oracle exist only to make money. Microsoft looking good is just an amusing side effect.
- suyash 8y ago
  It's one of the market leader in enterprise software and database for decades. Don't be just another hater.
  - fuzzy2 8y ago
    I’ve never heard a developer say good things about Oracle databases though. Being the #1 doesn’t mean you’re right. It just means your ads work.

gk1 8y ago

It’s also the trademark owner of “MySQL”, which I discovered when Google AdWords rejected some of my client’s ads for having “MySQL” in them (the client’s product integrates with the database). I spent weeks and many back-and-forth emails and calls with AdWords support trying to explain that 1) our use of the term is well within Oracle’s guidelines, and 2) no, I am not going to contact Oracle to fill out a permission form for me. It didn’t work. Not even with Level 2 support. Thankfully, AdWords policy enforcement is completely random and nonsensical so I just duplicated the ads several times until one of them did not get flagged.

tastyfreeze 8y ago

You must not have a lot experience with Oracle if you had even a moderately rosy opinion of Oracle. In my experience Oracle products are stupendously overpriced. They have been riding their dot-com boom clout in the hollow husk of a company. The only weapons Oracle has are vendor lock in and crushing competition with litigation.