> And by the way, and I've already fallen into this trap here, do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. Because if you--you need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawn mower. Lawnmower just does, like, mows the lawn. Like, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think like, oh the lawnmower hates me, lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Lawnmower--you don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower, don't fall into that trap about Oracle.
> So, and in particular with open source, oh they wanted to kill OpenSolaris, like no, the lawnmower doesn't care about OpenSolaris. The lawnmower doesn't think about OpenSolaris, the lawnmower can't care about OpenSolaris. The lawnmower can't have empathy.
(I listened to the speech and manually cleaned up YouTube's automatic transcription.)
(Not a lawyer.) To have rights to a trademark, you have to use it in, well, trade. It’s not enough for a term to refer to a specific thing in normal usage, you must have a widely recognized claim on that thing. It should be in the customer’s interest that your thing not be confusable with thing-alikes that others may offer, specifically by having an exclusive right to be sold as the thing. And Oracle demonstrably does not deal in “JavaScript” any more than many many other companies and individuals do.
The only JavaScript offering from Oracle that I know of is GraalVM[0]. It's funny though - they use "JavaScript" and "ECMAScript" interchangeably in their docs. They call it "A high-performance embeddable JavaScript runtime for Java" but then tout it as "ECMAScript Compliant", basically acknowledging that JavaScript is defined by ECMAScript specs and the terms mean the same thing.
Them calling it ECMAScript in some instances means that it follows the actual ECMA spec for ECMAScript (what everyone calls JavaScript historically). Them calling it JavaScript implies it could be their flavor, or something like Node and not necessarily strictly ECMAScript, at least that'd be the reason I'd use it interchangeably.
This is why I think Deno has a solid chance here. Sun may have filed for the trademark, but it’s not clear to me how much it has been used by Oracle. I also think this is why this step is likely the beginning of litigation, not the end. With Oracle not voluntarily withdrawing the trademark, it allows the rest of the process to invalidate the trademark to begin.
Not only that, but other company's not-technically-javascript products are widely known as JavaScript. And have been for close to 3 decades now (Microsoft's JScript was released in 1996)
The relationship between those two things is more like the relationship between burgers and fries, two things that some people may think belong together, but having a claim on one surely has connection to having a claim on the other.
> On the face of it, JavaScript seems like a pretty solid trademark.
It seems to me that it's the exact opposite of that: It's been so thoroughly genericised that it might as well not exist as a trademark. Also, I couldn't even tell you of a single product Oracle sells that uses the mark.
In my opinion, poking the sleeping fat bear is a dumb move, and a waste of money that is better spent funding individual contributors to important projects.
The worst case is unbelievably bad: they start asserting it. I would leave the status quo as-is and go find other hobbies. Besides, the longer it goes on without a battle, the better the case is to revoke it. It's infinitely better to let the status quo ride.
In previous threads related to this topic, someone proposed just abandoning JavaScript and calling it simply JS.
This seems a brilliant solution for multiple reasons, arguably even better than Oracle withdrawal of the trademark (which will still leave us with the car vs. carpet problem).
No, Sun trademarked JavaScript in the late 90s. Oracle acquired the trademark when they acquired Sun. Netscape - as you may know - originally called JavaScript LiveScript, but changed it to JavaScript, at least partially to ride the Java hype train. Sun retained the IP related to the name.
And though Sun was undeniably more worthy of sympathy than Oracle is, Sun’s original claim on the trademark seems just as bogus as Oracle’s current one.
Maybe. I'm not a lawyer, let alone an IP lawyer, but Netscape creating a programming language called "JavaScript" seems like the kind of thing that would be likely to cause confusion in the marketplace. Netscape explicitly chose the name to latch on to the popularity of Java at the time. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me for the Sun of 1997 to want to protect their interest in the Java name by licensing it to Netscape but controlling the underlying trademark.
Netscape didn't just try to "latch onto" the popularity of Java.
Netscape _and_ Sun, together, called it JavaScript. The point was that the renamed language had rudimentary bindings that you could use to connect functionality in an HTML page with the applets embedded in it (which were effectively silo'd in HotJava)
I mean, yes, it’s a reasonable thing for Sun to want, but I (also not a lawyer) don’t see how it’s within the USPTO’s purview to grant. Sun/Oracle can claim others’ use of “JavaScript” is confusing others with regard to what “Java” is—indeed as you say this seems to have been Netscape’s explicit intent with the name—but that means Sun/Oracle may have some control over the use of the term “JavaScript” through their very real dealings in Java, not their nonexistent ones in JavaScript. You don’t get to squat trademarks, you have to use them. (Unless you have enough money to outlast any challenger in a legal battle. I guess we’ll see how that goes.)
On the contrary, i think sun's claim back in the 90s was pretty strong. Only one company was making javascript and they were doing so under license.
Fast forward to today and there are many people making "javascript" that don't seem to have a relationship to oracle and nobody has been trying to defend the mark for a long time. Seems pretty genericized to me.
And the fact Oracle didn't sue for trademark infringement on that or TypeScript which is often referred to as JavaScript is probably not going to help Oracle here. But I doubt Oracle cares either way.
Nor did they sue ActionScript (Macromedia Flash's implementation of JavaScript), CoffeeScript (a separate language that compiles to JavaScript, and has a name very much evoking Java).
I don't see any reason why that would matter. The name "actionscript" does not have the word "java" in it.
The relavent part is they didn't sue anyone using the name "javascript". Even if they had a valid trademark (which i doubt) that doesn't prevent anyone from selling a similar product under a different name.
I was replying to that_guy_iain, who pointed out that Oracle didn't sue Microsoft for TypeScript. Notice that TypeScript does not have the word "Java" in it either.
Ecmascript was coined by ECMA International when they published the JS standard just to cover their ass and not get sued by Sun. It was never intended to be a name for the language, and has never been treated as such.
NOT Browserscript then. JS moved beyond the browser almost 3 decades ago (rhino.jar, anyone?) and became mainstream on the server side almost a decade ago.
Whenever anyone says "JavaScript" they actually mean "ECMAScript", which is the language browsers and scripting engines actually implement. The Web standard documents cannot use the term "JavaScript" because of the trademark issue.
There isn't even such a thing as "Oracle JavaScript", they are sitting on the trademark without using it.
> Whenever anyone says "JavaScript" they actually mean "ECMAScript", which is the language browsers and scripting engines actually implement.
It’s the exact opposite though. Whenever someone says ECMAScript they actually mean “I want to say JavaScript but for legal reasons I’m using another name for it” but that also happens so rarely that it’s not worth considering.
If I invent a new term for iPads and say “well actually when people say iPad they mean ECMApad which is technically the same just a different branding of it” that doesn’t give me grounds to have Apples trademark on iPad discarded.
Programmers may not like it, but JavaScript is a pretty well established and robust trademark and people use it correctly to refer to the same one thing. The problem really just is that people don’t like the owners of it, but that’s hardly a case to have it invalidated.
> I invent a new term for iPads and say “well actually when people say iPad they mean ECMApad which is technically the same just a different branding of it” that doesn’t give me grounds to have Apples trademark on iPad discarded.
The point of a trademark is to protect Your brand.
Oracle doesn't make any product called JavaScript nor do they use JavaScript as a trademark in anything.
Your example with Apple is wrong because Apple makes devices that they call iPads.
I’ve been using JavaScript since the first version in Netscape navigator. When I say JavaScript, that’s what I’m referring to. It may have had some things bolted on over the past quarter century, but I still think of it as that thing way back when.
Technically from a legal perspective you aren't using JavaScript any more because it's being produced by a company (Google, Apple, whoever) who doesn't own the trademark to call it JavaScript. So it legally isn't JavaScript even if it's directly descended from something that was legally JavaScript.
The fact that you and everyone else still call this thing we have now JavaScript is exactly why this trademark thing is stupid and most likely invalid.
JavaScript can refer to the standard specification of ECMAScript, as well as the many implementations notably including v8 (chromium, node, deno), JavaScriptCore (webkit), and spidermonkey (Firefox), as well as some lesser known ones like duktape and QuickJS. And it can also be used to refer to an ECMAScript implementation plus an additional runtime platform like the Web API, or something like node or deno.
And Oracle doesn't control any of that. The only thing I know of that Oracle has related to JavaScript is Graal.js, which is just yet another implementation of ECMAScript, and didn't even exist for most of the time Sun and Oracle held the trademark.
People use the term iPad to refer to non Apple tablets as well. That’s not an argument against Apples trademark.
People may not like Oracle, but the arguments against them owning the trademark on the grounds that it’s used to refer to the thing that it actually is, are extemely weak. I can see the non-use argument being a viable path though.
JavaScript can refer to many different similar languages, the runtimes, the standard library, etc.
People using JavaScript without getting permission are potentially infringing on Oracle's trademark. Many companies with trademarks tenaciously defend the trademark to protect it from being revoked. This doesn't appear to be the case with JavaScript. After usage becomes widespread, a company risks losing their trademark because they did not actively enforce the use of the trademark.
I can't believe this is real. A US corporation that everyone knows making a video about their trademark and it's not corporate slop but well made, somewhat making fun of themselves even not shying away from "coarse" language? I kept on looking at the username because surely this had to be a parody.
Went to Wikipedia:
"Velcro is a *British privately held*" company".
Makes slightly more sense now, don't think it would have seen the light of day if either of those were different.
Content advisory: there is one swear word in it that is bleeped out.
Near the end they mention some other trademarks, and adding to the fun they bleep out those too - and even put CENSORED overlays on the singers' mouths.
They also made a followup video that is just as delightful (and slightly more NSFW):
[1.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s
reply