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Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark

rtkis 4y ago
I think the post needs a clarification in that ECMAScript is not a language and has nothing to do with the name JavaScript. ECMA International defines a standard called ECMAScript that implementations such as JavaScript, ActionScript3 (Adobe), TypeScript and probably some more have adopted. https://blog.risingstack.com/history-of-javascript-on-a-timeline/ https://blog.risingstack.com/history-of-javascript-on-a-time...
encryptluks2 4y ago
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  ECMAScript?
robertwt7 4y ago
It does sound confusing. Just like the different versions of java and distributions that we have now as well. I don’t think they’ll ever do it though, given the history of oracle
- kaba0 4y ago
  What is confusing about there being like 10 OpenJDK forks, but for all practical purposes they are identical even more so than linux distros. And if you want paid support you ca choose for example OracleJDK, which is otherwise feature-equivalent to OpenJDK (as it is also just a tiny fork), which’s LTS version is free for the next LTS+1 year. This is the same model as Red Hat Linux vs Fedora.
  - vips7L 4y ago
    Gets even worse with IBM/Eclipse marketing OpenJ9 with OpenJdk which has nothing do with the OpenJdk project and is a completely different VM implementation.
- chasil 4y ago
  Just imagine how fans of Solaris and ZFS feel.
bigmattystyles 4y ago
Banking on Oracle caring about goodwill is not going to be successful.
- gary_0 4y ago
  "You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- Bryan Cantrill
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LeoPanthera 4y ago
I think this should link to here: https://tinyclouds.org/trademark https://tinyclouds.org/trademark, not the front page.
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xdmr 4y ago
[flagged]
cpeterso 4y ago
JavaScript is trademarked and not related to Java. ECMA should adopt the name “JS”. Just JS, not an acronym. That’s what people call it anyway.
- fragmede 4y ago
  How do you pronounce JS out loud, and why is your way right and the other way wrong?
  - fingerlocks 4y ago
    My vote is “Jizz”, because it’s phonetic. Which will eventually become JizzScript, infuriating everyone bothered by ATM machines and PIN numbers.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      I think that name will bother people for more reasons than that XD But that was of course your point.
  - puyoxyz 4y ago
    Just say the letters? Jay Ess in english, Jota Ese in spanish, etc… What other way is there ?
    - machinawhite 4y ago
      In poland people will not be sure if it's Jot Es or if they want to sound cool and say Dżej Es so it's nice and english. Big problem!
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    You pronounce it as "javascript" in casual conversation, disregarding Oracle's trademark because they're not going to do shit about it. Not even Oracle. Xerox can't stop people from trampling all over their trademark in casual conversation and neither can Oracle.
- deleted 4y ago
shmerl 4y ago
LiveScript would have been better.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  Too late. The name was taken when it was free. https://livescript.net/ https://livescript.net/ (But seems inactive judging by GitHub). Actually a mostly quite nice little toy language. (Only the OOP part seems messed up a little bit; but besides that it looks quite clean).
gumby 4y ago
Can’t you just call it ECMAScript, or are they somehow different these days? Guy Steele told me once that Sun registered it with ECMA so they could tell people (governments?) that it was a registered standard and that ECMA was the easiest/fastest/most compliant way to get there. I’d always thought that ECMA was a weird place to register it.
- thedebuglife 4y ago
  I believe ECMAScript is the specification of which JavaScript is an implementation.
  - _ZeD_ 4y ago
    I always have had problem with this definition... what do you mean by "implementation"? in my head "implementations" are "programs". Like... "C" is a specification, "gcc" is an implementation. "Python" is a specification, "CPython", "PyPy", ... are implementations. "ECMAScript" is a specification, "webkit", "spidermonkey", ... are implementations. "JavaScript" is a (trademarked) specification, and also "ECMAScript" and "JavaScript" are "very very similar" (wink wink)
    - derefr 4y ago
      D20 is an open standard for a certain genre of tabletop role playing games, of which Dungeons and Dragons™ is an implementation. But D&D itself is an abstract concept, with two implementations: the open-game-licensed online “D20 SRD”, and the proprietary set of WotC-published core books.
    - colordrops 4y ago
      Flash's ActionScript was also ab implementation of ECMAScript IIRC
      - Karliss 4y ago
        That's one thing I never understood. For me they seemed like completely different languages. Now looking at history in Wikipedia, it seems that old version of ActionScript was based on old version of ECMAScript specification. And ActionScript 2 which introduced strict typing and classes (that look nothing like JavaScript) was partially based on ECMAScript 4(which was abandoned as being too different from previous ECMAScript 3). Latest version of ECMAScript is 13. So at this point it seems like latest versions of JavaScript and ActionScript(3) have as much common as D and Rust. They shared early history but afterwards diverged quite a bit.
adharmad 4y ago
It is very likely that people in the core technical teams are not even aware that Oracle owns the Javascript trademark.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  I worked with a team implementing JavaScript at Oracle and of course we knew it.
  - adharmad 4y ago
    I stand corrected. My knowledge was anecdotal and limited to OCI and FMW groups.
c3534l 4y ago
Could you successfully argue that its generic at this point? I strongly doubt anyone seriously thinks when you talk about Javascript, you're talking about only products and tools made by Oracle.
- skissane 4y ago
  I am guessing that Oracle is worried that if they give up (or somehow lose) the JavaScript trademark, that may threaten their ownership of the Java trademark - the later is far more important to them than the former.
  - fastball 4y ago
    IANAL but seems like intentionally giving up the specific JavaScript trademark would actually help with that, since if a disagreement over JavaScript ever went to court and Oracle lost it could very easily domino into the Java trademark. Give it up and it never goes to court.
graderjs 4y ago
Good. Nice article and nice looking blog. But should have been a private letter to let Oracle save the face of "coming up with this goodwill gesture themselves".
Scootwilli90 4y ago
[flagged]
- 0___0 4y ago
  ^^^ Spam. Don't click
ksec 4y ago
I hope the release their ZFS as BSD as well.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  I hope someone will give me a million bucks. Which is more likely.
bruce511 4y ago
I feel like this isn't a problem that needs solving. The existence of a trademark doesn't prevent you using that trademark (as in referencing it like "this app is written in JavaScript".) Clearly Oracle is not defending the trademark, and it is likely its too late to start. Worst case they pick on you, you change your docs to say Ecmascript. Frankly it's safer where it is, than being released so the USPO or something can issue it to someone else. A bigger intrinsic problem is lay-programmers confusing JavaScript with Java, and unfortunately there's no fixing that.
- kristiandupont 4y ago
  I agree. >Careful law abiding engineers bend over backwards to avoid its use ..do they really? It never occurred to me but maybe I don't qualify as careful and law abiding.
  - derefr 4y ago
    It’d probably only be something that’d be relevant to worry about in e.g. technical documentation that ships with a commercial product. That’s the sort of use-case where I’d be worrying about what IP (including trademarks) are being referenced.
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- russellbeattie 4y ago
  Well... Oracle is lead by the most ruthless, unethical, Machiavellian business person in tech and his devoted acolytes. They probably don't gaf. But it wouldn't surprise me for Oracle to decide on some last minute resurrection of the brand and start legal armageddon. (In fact, calling attention to the situation is probably the worst thing to do...) That said, my guess is all they really want is for it to be a zero cost pain in the ass for Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. (Yes... You youngsters might think Bezos or Zuck might be gunning for that title, but they got nothing on ol' Larry. He's evil incarnate. There's reasons those other two are always in the news and Ellison is not. Think about it. Pure evil.)
Friday0722 4y ago
They've got so much badwill at this point that it would be pointless trying to get any goodwill out of this.
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rafftre 4y ago
We can call it VanillaScript. Seems appropriate with how we generally call its usage :)
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  Script
bb88 4y ago
Call it WebScript or DOMScript or HTMLScript or MozillaScript or something. ECMAScript is absolutely the worse name for it.
- Aleksdev 4y ago
  Thank you. I thought I was the only one.
- teddyh 4y ago
  GoScript!
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  Script
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- fomine3 4y ago
  Netscape should name it Netscript
jpswade 4y ago
There’s absolutely no way that Oracle would release a trademark.
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dvh 4y ago
I call it JS
- amelius 4y ago
  I call it JS in official documents, and JavaScript where Oracle can't sue me for it :)
sph 4y ago
@dang can we update the URL to https://tinyclouds.org/trademark https://tinyclouds.org/trademark instead of the blog home page?
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sgammon 4y ago
> Oracle doesn’t even participate in the development of any of the JavaScript engines So anyway have you heard of GraalVM
kijin 4y ago
Just call it JS already. Forget about the "Java" bit, as JS really doesn't have much to do with Java anymore. Forget about ECMA as well -- that's a mouthful -- though I strongly suspect that the people who design JS believe verbosity is a virtue in all of their naming schemes. Just call it JS and invite the community to come up with whatever silly backronym they see fit. Just super? Jihad script? Jelly sandwich? Juniper spirit? Other languages have been doing it for decades, so why not?
- ifdefdebug 4y ago
  I propose "JS Sucks"
- still_grokking 4y ago
  I really like "JihadScript"! But I think it's not offensive enough.
r12343a_19 4y ago
Since they trademarked Java makes sense to keep the JavaScript trademark. JavaScript was a terrible terrible name, but it is what it is... This is a non-problem for the world. I never heard of this being enforced in any way.
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- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  > JavaScript was a terrible terrible name, but it is what it is... "LiveScript" was a great name, they never should have changed it.
jbverschoor 4y ago
jajascript. ja, because it wasn't really complete yet jaja because we keep copying over node_modules
chrisseaton 4y ago
> Oracle does not have any products using the trademark … Oracle doesn’t even participate in the development of any of the JavaScript engines Strangely ignorant from Ryan - Oracle does maintain a JavaScript engine product - GraalJS. In fact is it possibly the only modern engine available under a commercial licence?
- vips7L 4y ago
  Nashorn is still maintained too, it’s just no longer in the jdk by default.
- styfle 4y ago
  Is GraalJS a fork of Node.js? Because I doubt Ry would write this article if he was one of the top contributors to GraalJS which is what this graph says: https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/graphs/contributors https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/graphs/contributors
  - styfle 4y ago
    Must be a fork because I found my own commits haha https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/commits?author=styfle https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/commits?author=styfle
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      No, not really a fork. GraalJS is a new independent from-scratch implementation of JavaScript. It uses a pair of radically different execution and optimisation techniques known as self-specialising-ASTs, and partial evaluation, and runs on the JVM. But a sibling project, Graal-Node.js, does include vendored code from Node.js in order to be compatible with Node.js applications. That's where the commits come from I'd guess. Compare: https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/tree/master/graal-js https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/tree/master/graal-js https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/tree/master/graal-nodejs https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/tree/master/graal-nodejs
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GekkePrutser 4y ago
Haha asking Oracle to give up legal rights. Good luck with that :) :) :) PS I never understood why they called it JavaScript since it has nothing to do with Java.
- mysterydip 4y ago
  My only thought was to associate it with the "write once run anywhere" nature of java.
- pid-1 4y ago
  If I understand correctly it was a marketing thing (cof cof C#), but also the creators actually had plans to collaborate with Sun and (somehow?) integrate the language with Java.
  - bugmen0t 4y ago
    Oh they did. You could call into the JVM from JS even in early 2010s Firefox. Called LiveScript, I believe.
    - clairity 4y ago
      yup, i wrote a dynamic simulation using this technique in the late 90s, using java to implement a rk45 ODE solver and js/html canvas for visualization and controls.
- jasode 4y ago
  >PS I never understood why they called it JavaScript since it has nothing to do with Java. Netscape's Javascript had something to with Sun's Java in the sense that both languages were deliberately positioned together in the Netscape browser back in 1995. Key people from both Netscape and Sun worked together on that. Java would be positioned as the "professional compiled language" and Javascript would be the "easier scripting language". My previous comment with a link to Brendan Eich's explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26502156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26502156 But yes, if one only looks at the syntax of Javascript being different from Java -- without any context of what happened in 1995, it does seem like Javascript was misnamed.
TheDesolate0 4y ago
peanut_worm 4y ago
When can we just start calling it ECMAScript
imdsm 4y ago
On the other hand, the community could rename its implementation of JS and go with a new approach, so long as it isn't ECMAScript.
tomxor 4y ago
> Yet it is obviously the right move to trade a worthless trademark for brand marketing and goodwill. Just to play devils advocate... I think Oracle has so little goodwill with devs (quite the opposite), that releasing the JS trademark probably won't even move the needle.
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  They don't make any money from devs anyway. They sell their stuff to the business people who then force it onto devs. When I worked in government, we had some Oracle DBs. They were bought without consulting anyone who worked on the tech teams.
  - denimnerd42 4y ago
    A business still needs to hire people to work on Oracle db. At my company they have trouble hiring for it. They resort to shared service orgs to provide DBA services. That means one DBA per 10-100 application developers. It’s awful. We do anything to avoid oracle because we can’t get a DBA to help us. Even use hadoop hive for non hive use cases. I guess my point is that these struggles eventually do reach the leaders and they choose something else. We moved off teradata because of shared service orgs so we'll probably leave this type of oracle at some point too. Either a completely self service option of oracle or an open source one.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      When you're ready, EDB will be there to make the move as painless as possible :-)
  - _fat_santa 4y ago
    > They were bought without consulting anyone who worked on the tech teams. I'm gonna bet the managers didn't ask because they knew what the immediate answer would be
  - tomxor 4y ago
    For large corporations and gov organisations I can see how that could plausibly be true... for everything else, not so much. At smaller companies the hierarchy is not so rigid or deep, and people are not so siloed, they must work together more closely and feel each others pain. I'm a dev at a such a small company, and in a position that I can make or highly influence such decisions. Oracle products will never be in our supply chain because of me - a dev.
dwheeler 4y ago
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s) Quote previously posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728 :-)
- dwheeler 4y ago
  Just to clarify: I've always thought this quote was funny, but my point is that if you want Oracle to do this, you'll have to give them a good reason. They can't spend good will.
- belter 4y ago
  Never gets old... :-) "...I am going to try to make through this slide without crying..." "...and by the way not to put too sharp a point on this..."
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hnbad 4y ago
There seems to be some confusion in the comments. The language is called JavaScript. It was temporarily called other things including LiveScript during early development. It was developed at Netscape to be the scripting language for Netscape's browser and server (yes, you read that right). It was also the basis for a proposed competitor to CSS called JavaScript Style Sheets only ever supported by Netscape 4. The trademark to the name was held by Sun prior to its acquisition by Oracle. The existence of the trademark led to Microsoft calling their reverse engineered implementation of the language "JScript". In order to avoid fragmentation via incompatible implementations Netscape published an official language spec with ECMA, an international standards organization similar to ISO. Because the specification could not use the trademarked name this led to the name "ECMAScript" which the official specifications have used ever since. ECMAScript 3 is also the basis for ActionScript 2 used in Flash by Macromedia/Adobe, which is not fully compatible with JavaScript. ActionScript 3 was heavily influenced by the proposed ECMAScript 4, which was eventually scrapped because it tried to do too many things at once (while also intentionally being backwars-incompatible) and none of the companies involved at that point could agree on anything. This led to the heavily downscaled ECMAScript 5 release as a compromise until 2005 when ECMAScript 6 started the current model of yearly releases by defining a multi-stage process for new language features. The obvious question is why it was called JavaScript to begin with. Again, there are many wrong answers in the comments. The generally accepted history is that Sun and Netscape wanted to cooperate to bring Java into Netscape as the new universal language for applications. Java was already going to be available for cross-platform desktop applications (and later for embedded applications like on feature phones) and Java applets were supposed to bring it to the browser. According to various people involved at the time, Netscape's own scripting language was considered a problem by Sun so in order to avoid competing with Java, JavaScript received its final name in order to be rebranded as a "light-weight scripting language" alongside the "serious application development language" of Java. It's also worth mentioning that JavaScript in the browser not only consists of the ECMAScript spec but also the DOM APIs, which were originally written in a language agnostic way because there was no consensus for what the default language for accessing these APIs would be. In addition to JavaScript and JScript, Microsoft also pushed VBScript (based on Visual Basic) and there were some attempts to let Java access the DOM APIs from within the JVM. With Java applets being mostly dead and JavaScript having survived all other browser scripting languages, DOM spec writers have recently moved to considering JavaScript as the primary implementation language and mapping their implementation agnostic pseudo-language to JavaScript language features explicitly. This should hopefully reduce the number of language quirks in future web APIs (like the various native "list" types that don't quite behave like JavaScript arrays or `document.all` being falsey). So in short, JavaScript is called Java so not to compete with Java for "serious browser applications" in the 1990s and ECMAScript is originally a subset of Netscape's (and later Mozilla's) JavaScript although JavaScript has since shrunk and ECMAScript expanded (e.g. JS's `let` and `const` outside strict mode have been superceded by ECMAScript's more recent `let` and `const` in strict mode) to the point that both terms are used interchangeably regardless of the runtime environment. If you're wondering why Netscape went with ECMA of all places instead of something more obvious: neither the IETF nor W3C wanted to get involved in programming language specifications at the time and the ISO process took too long but there was a way to fast-track ECMA standards to ISO standards. Remember that this all happened during the peak of the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft, so this was the only thing that mattered at the time. If you want to learn more about the early history of JavaScript I'd suggest reading Brendan Eich's written history of it: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386327 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386327
bmitc 4y ago
Does Oracle enforce it? If not, shouldn’t people just start using it? Haven’t people been using it anyway? I’m not sure I understand what type of activities are being prevented by the trademark.

I think the post needs a clarification in that ECMAScript is not a language and has nothing to do with the name JavaScript. ECMA International defines a standard called ECMAScript that implementations such as JavaScript, ActionScript3 (Adobe), TypeScript and probably some more have adopted. https://blog.risingstack.com/history-of-javascript-on-a-timeline/ https://blog.risingstack.com/history-of-javascript-on-a-time...

encryptluks2 4y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
ECMAScript?

robertwt7 4y ago

It does sound confusing. Just like the different versions of java and distributions that we have now as well. I don’t think they’ll ever do it though, given the history of oracle

kaba0 4y ago
What is confusing about there being like 10 OpenJDK forks, but for all practical purposes they are identical even more so than linux distros. And if you want paid support you ca choose for example OracleJDK, which is otherwise feature-equivalent to OpenJDK (as it is also just a tiny fork), which’s LTS version is free for the next LTS+1 year. This is the same model as Red Hat Linux vs Fedora.
- vips7L 4y ago
  Gets even worse with IBM/Eclipse marketing OpenJ9 with OpenJdk which has nothing do with the OpenJdk project and is a completely different VM implementation.
chasil 4y ago
Just imagine how fans of Solaris and ZFS feel.

bigmattystyles 4y ago

Banking on Oracle caring about goodwill is not going to be successful.

gary_0 4y ago
"You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- Bryan Cantrill
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LeoPanthera 4y ago

I think this should link to here: https://tinyclouds.org/trademark https://tinyclouds.org/trademark, not the front page.

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xdmr 4y ago

[flagged]

cpeterso 4y ago

JavaScript is trademarked and not related to Java. ECMA should adopt the name “JS”. Just JS, not an acronym. That’s what people call it anyway.

fragmede 4y ago
How do you pronounce JS out loud, and why is your way right and the other way wrong?
- fingerlocks 4y ago
  My vote is “Jizz”, because it’s phonetic. Which will eventually become JizzScript, infuriating everyone bothered by ATM machines and PIN numbers.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    I think that name will bother people for more reasons than that XD But that was of course your point.
- puyoxyz 4y ago
  Just say the letters? Jay Ess in english, Jota Ese in spanish, etc… What other way is there ?
  - machinawhite 4y ago
    In poland people will not be sure if it's Jot Es or if they want to sound cool and say Dżej Es so it's nice and english. Big problem!
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  You pronounce it as "javascript" in casual conversation, disregarding Oracle's trademark because they're not going to do shit about it. Not even Oracle. Xerox can't stop people from trampling all over their trademark in casual conversation and neither can Oracle.
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shmerl 4y ago

LiveScript would have been better.

still_grokking 4y ago
Too late. The name was taken when it was free. https://livescript.net/ https://livescript.net/ (But seems inactive judging by GitHub). Actually a mostly quite nice little toy language. (Only the OOP part seems messed up a little bit; but besides that it looks quite clean).

gumby 4y ago

Can’t you just call it ECMAScript, or are they somehow different these days? Guy Steele told me once that Sun registered it with ECMA so they could tell people (governments?) that it was a registered standard and that ECMA was the easiest/fastest/most compliant way to get there. I’d always thought that ECMA was a weird place to register it.

thedebuglife 4y ago
I believe ECMAScript is the specification of which JavaScript is an implementation.
- _ZeD_ 4y ago
  I always have had problem with this definition... what do you mean by "implementation"? in my head "implementations" are "programs". Like... "C" is a specification, "gcc" is an implementation. "Python" is a specification, "CPython", "PyPy", ... are implementations. "ECMAScript" is a specification, "webkit", "spidermonkey", ... are implementations. "JavaScript" is a (trademarked) specification, and also "ECMAScript" and "JavaScript" are "very very similar" (wink wink)
  - derefr 4y ago
    D20 is an open standard for a certain genre of tabletop role playing games, of which Dungeons and Dragons™ is an implementation. But D&D itself is an abstract concept, with two implementations: the open-game-licensed online “D20 SRD”, and the proprietary set of WotC-published core books.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Flash's ActionScript was also ab implementation of ECMAScript IIRC
    - Karliss 4y ago
      That's one thing I never understood. For me they seemed like completely different languages. Now looking at history in Wikipedia, it seems that old version of ActionScript was based on old version of ECMAScript specification. And ActionScript 2 which introduced strict typing and classes (that look nothing like JavaScript) was partially based on ECMAScript 4(which was abandoned as being too different from previous ECMAScript 3). Latest version of ECMAScript is 13. So at this point it seems like latest versions of JavaScript and ActionScript(3) have as much common as D and Rust. They shared early history but afterwards diverged quite a bit.

adharmad 4y ago

It is very likely that people in the core technical teams are not even aware that Oracle owns the Javascript trademark.

chrisseaton 4y ago
I worked with a team implementing JavaScript at Oracle and of course we knew it.
- adharmad 4y ago
  I stand corrected. My knowledge was anecdotal and limited to OCI and FMW groups.

c3534l 4y ago

Could you successfully argue that its generic at this point? I strongly doubt anyone seriously thinks when you talk about Javascript, you're talking about only products and tools made by Oracle.

skissane 4y ago
I am guessing that Oracle is worried that if they give up (or somehow lose) the JavaScript trademark, that may threaten their ownership of the Java trademark - the later is far more important to them than the former.
- fastball 4y ago
  IANAL but seems like intentionally giving up the specific JavaScript trademark would actually help with that, since if a disagreement over JavaScript ever went to court and Oracle lost it could very easily domino into the Java trademark. Give it up and it never goes to court.

graderjs 4y ago

Good. Nice article and nice looking blog. But should have been a private letter to let Oracle save the face of "coming up with this goodwill gesture themselves".

Scootwilli90 4y ago

[flagged]

0___0 4y ago
^^^ Spam. Don't click

ksec 4y ago

I hope the release their ZFS as BSD as well.

GekkePrutser 4y ago
I hope someone will give me a million bucks. Which is more likely.

bruce511 4y ago

I feel like this isn't a problem that needs solving. The existence of a trademark doesn't prevent you using that trademark (as in referencing it like "this app is written in JavaScript".) Clearly Oracle is not defending the trademark, and it is likely its too late to start. Worst case they pick on you, you change your docs to say Ecmascript. Frankly it's safer where it is, than being released so the USPO or something can issue it to someone else. A bigger intrinsic problem is lay-programmers confusing JavaScript with Java, and unfortunately there's no fixing that.

kristiandupont 4y ago
I agree. >Careful law abiding engineers bend over backwards to avoid its use ..do they really? It never occurred to me but maybe I don't qualify as careful and law abiding.
- derefr 4y ago
  It’d probably only be something that’d be relevant to worry about in e.g. technical documentation that ships with a commercial product. That’s the sort of use-case where I’d be worrying about what IP (including trademarks) are being referenced.
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russellbeattie 4y ago
Well... Oracle is lead by the most ruthless, unethical, Machiavellian business person in tech and his devoted acolytes. They probably don't gaf. But it wouldn't surprise me for Oracle to decide on some last minute resurrection of the brand and start legal armageddon. (In fact, calling attention to the situation is probably the worst thing to do...) That said, my guess is all they really want is for it to be a zero cost pain in the ass for Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. (Yes... You youngsters might think Bezos or Zuck might be gunning for that title, but they got nothing on ol' Larry. He's evil incarnate. There's reasons those other two are always in the news and Ellison is not. Think about it. Pure evil.)

Friday0722 4y ago

They've got so much badwill at this point that it would be pointless trying to get any goodwill out of this.

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rafftre 4y ago

We can call it VanillaScript. Seems appropriate with how we generally call its usage :)

aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
Script

bb88 4y ago

Call it WebScript or DOMScript or HTMLScript or MozillaScript or something. ECMAScript is absolutely the worse name for it.

Aleksdev 4y ago
Thank you. I thought I was the only one.
teddyh 4y ago
GoScript!
aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
Script
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fomine3 4y ago
Netscape should name it Netscript

jpswade 4y ago

There’s absolutely no way that Oracle would release a trademark.

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dvh 4y ago

I call it JS

amelius 4y ago
I call it JS in official documents, and JavaScript where Oracle can't sue me for it :)

sph 4y ago

@dang can we update the URL to https://tinyclouds.org/trademark https://tinyclouds.org/trademark instead of the blog home page?

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sgammon 4y ago

> Oracle doesn’t even participate in the development of any of the JavaScript engines So anyway have you heard of GraalVM

kijin 4y ago

Just call it JS already. Forget about the "Java" bit, as JS really doesn't have much to do with Java anymore. Forget about ECMA as well -- that's a mouthful -- though I strongly suspect that the people who design JS believe verbosity is a virtue in all of their naming schemes. Just call it JS and invite the community to come up with whatever silly backronym they see fit. Just super? Jihad script? Jelly sandwich? Juniper spirit? Other languages have been doing it for decades, so why not?

ifdefdebug 4y ago
I propose "JS Sucks"
still_grokking 4y ago
I really like "JihadScript"! But I think it's not offensive enough.

r12343a_19 4y ago

Since they trademarked Java makes sense to keep the JavaScript trademark. JavaScript was a terrible terrible name, but it is what it is... This is a non-problem for the world. I never heard of this being enforced in any way.

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DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
> JavaScript was a terrible terrible name, but it is what it is... "LiveScript" was a great name, they never should have changed it.

jbverschoor 4y ago

jajascript. ja, because it wasn't really complete yet jaja because we keep copying over node_modules

chrisseaton 4y ago

> Oracle does not have any products using the trademark … Oracle doesn’t even participate in the development of any of the JavaScript engines Strangely ignorant from Ryan - Oracle does maintain a JavaScript engine product - GraalJS. In fact is it possibly the only modern engine available under a commercial licence?

vips7L 4y ago
Nashorn is still maintained too, it’s just no longer in the jdk by default.
styfle 4y ago
Is GraalJS a fork of Node.js? Because I doubt Ry would write this article if he was one of the top contributors to GraalJS which is what this graph says: https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/graphs/contributors https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/graphs/contributors
- styfle 4y ago
  Must be a fork because I found my own commits haha https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/commits?author=styfle https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/commits?author=styfle
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    No, not really a fork. GraalJS is a new independent from-scratch implementation of JavaScript. It uses a pair of radically different execution and optimisation techniques known as self-specialising-ASTs, and partial evaluation, and runs on the JVM. But a sibling project, Graal-Node.js, does include vendored code from Node.js in order to be compatible with Node.js applications. That's where the commits come from I'd guess. Compare: https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/tree/master/graal-js https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/tree/master/graal-js https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/tree/master/graal-nodejs https://github.com/oracle/graaljs/tree/master/graal-nodejs
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GekkePrutser 4y ago

Haha asking Oracle to give up legal rights. Good luck with that :) :) :) PS I never understood why they called it JavaScript since it has nothing to do with Java.

mysterydip 4y ago
My only thought was to associate it with the "write once run anywhere" nature of java.
pid-1 4y ago
If I understand correctly it was a marketing thing (cof cof C#), but also the creators actually had plans to collaborate with Sun and (somehow?) integrate the language with Java.
- bugmen0t 4y ago
  Oh they did. You could call into the JVM from JS even in early 2010s Firefox. Called LiveScript, I believe.
  - clairity 4y ago
    yup, i wrote a dynamic simulation using this technique in the late 90s, using java to implement a rk45 ODE solver and js/html canvas for visualization and controls.
jasode 4y ago
>PS I never understood why they called it JavaScript since it has nothing to do with Java. Netscape's Javascript had something to with Sun's Java in the sense that both languages were deliberately positioned together in the Netscape browser back in 1995. Key people from both Netscape and Sun worked together on that. Java would be positioned as the "professional compiled language" and Javascript would be the "easier scripting language". My previous comment with a link to Brendan Eich's explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26502156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26502156 But yes, if one only looks at the syntax of Javascript being different from Java -- without any context of what happened in 1995, it does seem like Javascript was misnamed.

TheDesolate0 4y ago

peanut_worm 4y ago

When can we just start calling it ECMAScript

imdsm 4y ago

On the other hand, the community could rename its implementation of JS and go with a new approach, so long as it isn't ECMAScript.

tomxor 4y ago

> Yet it is obviously the right move to trade a worthless trademark for brand marketing and goodwill. Just to play devils advocate... I think Oracle has so little goodwill with devs (quite the opposite), that releasing the JS trademark probably won't even move the needle.

MattGaiser 4y ago
They don't make any money from devs anyway. They sell their stuff to the business people who then force it onto devs. When I worked in government, we had some Oracle DBs. They were bought without consulting anyone who worked on the tech teams.
- denimnerd42 4y ago
  A business still needs to hire people to work on Oracle db. At my company they have trouble hiring for it. They resort to shared service orgs to provide DBA services. That means one DBA per 10-100 application developers. It’s awful. We do anything to avoid oracle because we can’t get a DBA to help us. Even use hadoop hive for non hive use cases. I guess my point is that these struggles eventually do reach the leaders and they choose something else. We moved off teradata because of shared service orgs so we'll probably leave this type of oracle at some point too. Either a completely self service option of oracle or an open source one.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    When you're ready, EDB will be there to make the move as painless as possible :-)
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  > They were bought without consulting anyone who worked on the tech teams. I'm gonna bet the managers didn't ask because they knew what the immediate answer would be
- tomxor 4y ago
  For large corporations and gov organisations I can see how that could plausibly be true... for everything else, not so much. At smaller companies the hierarchy is not so rigid or deep, and people are not so siloed, they must work together more closely and feel each others pain. I'm a dev at a such a small company, and in a position that I can make or highly influence such decisions. Oracle products will never be in our supply chain because of me - a dev.

dwheeler 4y ago

> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s) Quote previously posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728 :-)

dwheeler 4y ago
Just to clarify: I've always thought this quote was funny, but my point is that if you want Oracle to do this, you'll have to give them a good reason. They can't spend good will.
belter 4y ago
Never gets old... :-) "...I am going to try to make through this slide without crying..." "...and by the way not to put too sharp a point on this..."
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hnbad 4y ago

There seems to be some confusion in the comments. The language is called JavaScript. It was temporarily called other things including LiveScript during early development. It was developed at Netscape to be the scripting language for Netscape's browser and server (yes, you read that right). It was also the basis for a proposed competitor to CSS called JavaScript Style Sheets only ever supported by Netscape 4. The trademark to the name was held by Sun prior to its acquisition by Oracle. The existence of the trademark led to Microsoft calling their reverse engineered implementation of the language "JScript". In order to avoid fragmentation via incompatible implementations Netscape published an official language spec with ECMA, an international standards organization similar to ISO. Because the specification could not use the trademarked name this led to the name "ECMAScript" which the official specifications have used ever since. ECMAScript 3 is also the basis for ActionScript 2 used in Flash by Macromedia/Adobe, which is not fully compatible with JavaScript. ActionScript 3 was heavily influenced by the proposed ECMAScript 4, which was eventually scrapped because it tried to do too many things at once (while also intentionally being backwars-incompatible) and none of the companies involved at that point could agree on anything. This led to the heavily downscaled ECMAScript 5 release as a compromise until 2005 when ECMAScript 6 started the current model of yearly releases by defining a multi-stage process for new language features. The obvious question is why it was called JavaScript to begin with. Again, there are many wrong answers in the comments. The generally accepted history is that Sun and Netscape wanted to cooperate to bring Java into Netscape as the new universal language for applications. Java was already going to be available for cross-platform desktop applications (and later for embedded applications like on feature phones) and Java applets were supposed to bring it to the browser. According to various people involved at the time, Netscape's own scripting language was considered a problem by Sun so in order to avoid competing with Java, JavaScript received its final name in order to be rebranded as a "light-weight scripting language" alongside the "serious application development language" of Java. It's also worth mentioning that JavaScript in the browser not only consists of the ECMAScript spec but also the DOM APIs, which were originally written in a language agnostic way because there was no consensus for what the default language for accessing these APIs would be. In addition to JavaScript and JScript, Microsoft also pushed VBScript (based on Visual Basic) and there were some attempts to let Java access the DOM APIs from within the JVM. With Java applets being mostly dead and JavaScript having survived all other browser scripting languages, DOM spec writers have recently moved to considering JavaScript as the primary implementation language and mapping their implementation agnostic pseudo-language to JavaScript language features explicitly. This should hopefully reduce the number of language quirks in future web APIs (like the various native "list" types that don't quite behave like JavaScript arrays or `document.all` being falsey). So in short, JavaScript is called Java so not to compete with Java for "serious browser applications" in the 1990s and ECMAScript is originally a subset of Netscape's (and later Mozilla's) JavaScript although JavaScript has since shrunk and ECMAScript expanded (e.g. JS's `let` and `const` outside strict mode have been superceded by ECMAScript's more recent `let` and `const` in strict mode) to the point that both terms are used interchangeably regardless of the runtime environment. If you're wondering why Netscape went with ECMA of all places instead of something more obvious: neither the IETF nor W3C wanted to get involved in programming language specifications at the time and the ISO process took too long but there was a way to fast-track ECMA standards to ISO standards. Remember that this all happened during the peak of the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft, so this was the only thing that mattered at the time. If you want to learn more about the early history of JavaScript I'd suggest reading Brendan Eich's written history of it: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386327 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386327

bmitc 4y ago

Does Oracle enforce it? If not, shouldn’t people just start using it? Haven’t people been using it anyway? I’m not sure I understand what type of activities are being prevented by the trademark.