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Oracle, to my knowledge, does not profit at all off of the JavaScript name or brand. I don't see the purpose of defending this lawsuit. They have an opportunity to create some goodwill here, hold a press release, and say "We're gifting the JavaScript trademark to the developer community!" But instead they're defending something that they literally do not profit off of. It's absurd.
> They have an opportunity to create some goodwill here
According to Bryan Cantrill, you don't need to be open minded about Oracle. It's a waste of the openness of your mind. He says what you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. He believes there has been no entity in human history with less complexity and nuance to it than Oracle.
Bryan warns, "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing 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' -- the lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, the lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
This is so true. And in my experience Oracle's main business seems to be getting companies to sign complicated contracts, waiting a year or two, and then suing them for some infraction so that they can extort another contract from them. I haven't met an Oracle product yet that can't be done better by either free software or a less litigious company.
Broadcom has entered the chat.
It's wild that cease and desists and audit notices are becoming common ways to punish someone for just... not renewing your contract.
This is hyperbole to the extreme. I have nothing what so ever to do with oracle
There is nothing I take more glee in than listening to bcantrill talk negatively of Oracle. Whenever Oracle comes up in one of his talks or a podcast, I know I'm in for a treat.
GP is saying from a purely mechanical, non-human standpoint Oracle's actions don't make sense.
Oracle defends their properties whether it makes sense or not. That is what the machine does.
They do, if the lawnmower believes "more trademarks good" (and which corporation doesn't?), and trademarks must be actively used and defended to be kept.
Blood pathogen then?
Comment was deleted :(
Hahahahaha
They could reverse 90% of their brand damage in one swing by simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL, which also wouldn't cost them anything as far as I'm aware, but we're both making the mistake of anthropomorphizing the lawnmower.
Ignoring how Sun/Oracle's shenanigans with ZFS don't nearly account for "90% of their brand damage"...
> simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL
That can't be done at this point. Owing to a decision that arose right here from a discussion on HN, the ZFS maintainers adopted a policy in 2016 to opt out of the CDDL's built-in "any subsequent version" clause for new source files:
~/scratch/zfs$ grep --exclude-dir=.git -Ire "Common Development and Distribution License" -A 2 | grep -ie "\(Version 1\.0 only\|\<only\>.*\<version\>\)" | wc -l
821
> They could reverse 90% of their brand damage
Their stock is 50% higher than it was a year ago.
Not quite sure this is doing them damage.
Making a concession when they have not been forced to might indicate weakness to some. In that sense showing a speck of humanity might actually harm their stock.
My guess, is that the people who could break protocol are too busy to deal with a request to break protocol. Too busy to give it a thought.
And anyone who is sympathetic to the request, knows that campaigning for the protocol break would require disrupting two or three levels of management above them, forcing powerful people to deal with something they don't care about. And that would be interpreted as wasting important people's time.
So the organization, as a decision making entity, is incapable of recognizing, much less considering, requests for an exception to default behavior.
I worked with a business that operated this way for many years. Even when there were overwhelming reasons to break process, the spark and tinder never got anywhere near each other.
Everyone between the spark and tinder empathized, talked to "somebody" to demonstrate they "tried", and to create an alibi for the inevitable "no" response that came next, while quietly doing everything they could to smother that spark, before it burned them.
Thank for describing so eloquently this phenomenon, which IMHO is the root cause of the dysfunction endemic to big companies.
Satya's attempt to rehumanize Microsoft by making efforts to help open source projects really helped Microsoft's image
Yeah, but Microsoft also did a two steps forward and three steps back there. Things like shoving product ads onto the lock screen and preinstalling Candy Crush Soda Saga cost them more goodwill than any developer-facing effort earned them.
This one especially hurt only people who are inside Windows ecosystem. For people like me Microsoft is nice author of one product. I'm talking about VS Code.
Since Oracle is not in B2C, there is no brand damage in openly being a net-negative rent-seeker. Rent-seeking is what shareholders crave. It makes line go up, it has electrolytes.
It only makes the line go up in the short term. In the long term companies will avoid Oracle, and sales will go down. But shareholders don't care about the longterm.
Maybe they'll invest some of the rent into monopoly strategies and micro-improvements that keep Oracle attractive for high-stakes customers.
I hope I'm wrong though.
Oracle has demonstrated the long-term and their stock has never been higher. Their sales are finally heading higher again.. They're one of the oldest software companies and are approaching 50 years old. What is more long-term in their industry than what they have accomplished?
They're better positioned now than they have been at any other point in the past 10-15 years.
> Their stock is 50% higher than it was a year ago.
Tesla stock is 63% higher than it was a year ago, does this prove that each and every decision their leadership made was helpful to the bottom line?
It demonstrates that things that should matter, don't always.
Comment was deleted :(
I’m fairly certain the people buying Oracle stock ar elopking for exactly the kind of company it actually is.
>by simply updating CDDL
How about a simpler solution, just relicense everything to BSD / MIT.
The version of ZFS that everybody (besides the dwindling number of Oracle Solaris customers) uses now, OpenZFS, has been maintained completely independently of Oracle since they shut down OpenSolaris in 2010. This means that Oracle relicensing ZFS wouldn't do anything to help with getting it integrated into the Linux kernel, since there's been hundreds of independent contributors to ZFS since then who all own their own copyrights. Because ZFS is licensed under the CDDL, which has an automatic upgrade clause, Oracle could simply copy/paste the GPLv2 license text and call it "CDDL v2" if they wanted to make ZFS able to be included in Linux.
Not so fast.
Swapping to an entirely new license rather than adding one sentence to the existing one is not simpler either in terms of linguistics or getting approval from their army of lawyers.
It's not any more difficult either. They would both require getting all past contributors to agree.
I think some projects have done that in the past, but probably none where a big company owns the copyright to most of the code.
Why would they do that instead of the status quo, which is a gift for their lawyers to open later?
I don't associate Oracle and good will, and I don't think they care.
> They could reverse 90% of their brand damage in one swing by simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL
ZFS can be run under Linux - combining the Linux kernel with ZFS is a collective work (collection) of two independent works.
However, it is not legal to then redistribute this combination. Which essentially means linux distros cannot ship with OpenZFS: each user must combine the two on their own.
(This doesn’t necessarily stop people, but it is read by Debian as “illegal enough” to warrant a splash screen on installing OpenZFS that you’re losing the right to redistribute.)
ZFS is widely used with Linux in HPC (https://computing.llnl.gov/projects/openzfs). Is asking users to install ZFS separately really that much of a lift for ZFS's target audience?
Being out-of-tree means that kernel refactors break ZFS, and that it has a lot fewer hands and eyeballs available for the kinds of bugs that require internal design changes to fix (rather than paper over).
Asking for seperate install of a filesystem is a big deal. It severely limits how the filesystem can be used.
No, they could not. Anything Oracle does at this point will never undo the damage their brand has, or else you are a fool.
[dead]
Nowadays, it's a lawyer company - not a technology/software company. Their only reason for existence is to keep selling licenses for the things they own for as long as they still can, so it's pretty natural they're holding on to anything (regardless of actual value) they can.
It’s a huge company with different divisions.
Oracle is one of the leading researchers in JIT compilers, garbage collectors, and language interpreters.
Part of me thinks that's just the Oracle equivalent of janitorial and catering staff, the people you need to keep around to ensure the people creating the company profit, the sales people and lawyers, can work most efficiently.
Yeah unlike other companies who keep technical staff on rolls to wash their feet and drink that water. Because profiting from technical work is unthinkable in industry.
I honestly don’t see how those equate.
Back when Oracle acquired Sun they told us "Sun had more lawyers per capita than we"
Interpretation on the fact and metric and the need to tell I leave up to you
They have lawyers that need to justify their salary. Also why would they give up something for nothing. This is the “market forces” at work.
I think this is key. When you hire people to do work, they'll find stuff to do even if it isn't really necessary or a long term good for the company.
My favorite other example of this is when I see a UI redesign that didn't actually benefit anyone and was more a style change than anything, and sometimes actively makes usability worse (cough Liquid Glass cough) In those situations I always think "well, some designers on staff needed to justify their paychecks".
These are all the result of the principal agent problem
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/principal-agent-problem...
I think this is actually a bit different than the principal agent problem, at least how the principal agent problem is normally described and envisioned.
E.g. you often imagine cases like a manager making a decision that causes a short term pop in stock price (and bonuses to the manager) to the detriment of the long term health of the company when thinking about the principal agent problem. In the cases I'm thinking about, though, it's more that people rarely can do nothing, even if that's sometimes the best thing to do. E.g. large companies need to have lawyers and designers on staff for lots of reasons. But sometimes there just isn't enough work for these folks to do (even if they need to be "warm" and ready when important work comes along). And if there isn't enough work to do, these people will find work to do.
This is another reason why I think that, even though layoffs are painful, having people "milling about" without clear direction and purpose is the worst for everyone involved. These people will just schedule meetings, insert themselves where it isn't helpful, etc., just to make it seem like they have a purpose.
This could be thought of as a "variant" of the principal agent problem I guess, but this instance of "idle hands are the devil's playthings" is different enough from the "standard" principal agent problem that I don't think it's helpful to conflate these two things.
> But sometimes there just isn't enough work for these folks to do (even if they need to be "warm" and ready when important work comes along). And if there isn't enough work to do, these people will find work to do.
It is possible to find work in a different area at the company for such in-between times.
For example at the company where I work, a (very capable) secretary whose original role was not needed anymore, but for who there existed a very role in the future was for the in-between time assigned to assist some other department in their reporting duties to regulating authorities.
Not all employees are willing to rock the boat, ask around and risk exposing themselves as superfluous. It's less risky to always act like - or tell yourself - that every task that ends up on your desk require throughout diligence.
I think this is especially true at big corps with little actually meaningful work and where most people who actually care about doing meaningful work has left a long time ago.
It's not even justify their salary. A lawyer's sole job is to advocate for the legal position of their client as zealously as possible. A really good chief counsel would go to the CEO and weigh up the merits of the marketing win of "losing" this case. A drone lawyer just files whatever is necessary (or even unnecessary) to fight the case even when it makes zero god damn sense. e.g. giving a person a 25 year prison sentence for stealing a slice of pizza.
> Also why would they give up something for nothing.
Because it provides zero value and costs something to keep.
They hired outside counsel to represent them in this matter.
Goodwill isn't "nothing", but good luck explaining that to a lawyer.
Lawnmowers are incapable of caring about goodwill.
Quoting Bryan Cantrill? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2302s
Everyone who passionately defends a big company’s honor online needs to watch and understand that bit! Companies are not humans with feelings and empathy. They’re all lawnmowers. That they happen to be made of people doesn’t change their nature.
I'm not here to troll on Bryan nor Oxide, but wouldn't your same "rule" apply to Oxide?
"Corporate goodwill" is an oxymoron.
its a euphemism for "avoiding reputational damage"
This is the wrong way to look at it from a business perspective. They don’t directly profit off licensing or support or anything like that, but they gain free advertising.
They gain absolutely nothing by handing over the name and brand - in fact they lose valuable brand recognition.
Obviously most people in the industry hate them with a passion (see this thread as evidence), but many see the association as evidence that they might at least have some expertise with that product set. I certainly don’t agree with their position, but it makes sense commercially.
Brand recognition for what?
No one thinks of Oracle when they see JavaScript.
In fact for myself, today was the first day I knew Oracle have anything whatsoever to do with JavaScript.
Oracle purchased Sun, which purchased Netscape. I had to look it up.
Edit: more complete history https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44408760
How are they going to lose brand recognition, when a majority of people do not associate JavaScript with Oracle? The only language I associate with Oracle is Java.
The only logical reason I can think of to fight to keep the trademark is that they specifically don't want any goodwill, and that want to maintain their reputation as ruthless litigators.
Oracle is a law firm that sells IP. They'd rather control and strangle the name JavaScript than let people use it without their control.
> Oracle, to my knowledge, does not profit at all off of the JavaScript name or brand.
At this time, but their ownership and past behavior indicates that if Deno or anyone else tries to have a paid offering, there’s a non-zero chance Oracle will come sniffing for low effort money.
Isn't the entire reason because they funded JavaScript and in order to protect Java's trademark they maintain it just in case? I think that's the real simple answer. Feel free to educate me if someone knows different.
Oracle is doing something petty and absurd? Are you sure?
The hell, you say!
"To shreds, you say?"
Probably a reflexive action at this point. Ingrained into what's left of their soul I assume.
It literally wouldn't surprise me if when asked, the legal team simply responded "it's standing policy".
"soul"? Oracle never had one in the first place.
No need to “gift” it. It would be better if no one owned the trademark. Put it in the public domain.
I’m not sure if that’s even possible under US law though.
How is it that Oracle gets to claim this trademark at all? They never created it, Netscape did. Oracle bought Sun which could have challenged Netscape for naming JavaScript after Java, but I don't think they ever did.
Netscape originally licensed the trademark from Sun, who always owned it.
They profit through conflation with Java.
Almost like they’re not very smart people!
Well you just used "Oracle" and "JavaScript" in the same sentence so it seems it's useful to them to reinforce their brand.
Whoever thinks it's a good idea to bet on the altruism of a giant faceless corporation is dumb.
"Oracle" and goodwill is not a thing.
I mean I get Oracle hate and stuff, but remember the great and lovely Sun Microsystems used all tricks in the bag against Microsoft with respect to Java late 90s/early 2000s.
So, is "X abuses IP law" hatred is out of principle or because folks seem to be in love with Sun and Google and hate Oracle and Microsoft.
Specifically, this is why Internet Explorer had "JScript". Microsoft did bad things to Java and lost their trademark license.
Because Microsoft was trying to takeover and change Java, and Sun actually made Java. How is that in any way the same situation as this?
lawyers need something to do.
There's plenty of useful to do. Too bad they don't get paid to do that.
Oracle and "goodwill" in the same sentence is laughable.
Thank you to everyone behind this effort. At some point, decades ago in the past, Oracle added value to the tech ecosystem. Now, they’re a giant rent-extracting behemoth. I hate the fact that we can’t have nice things in 2025 simply because Oracle owns the IP. Oracle is what happens when corporations become lazy and hand over the keys to some brand names just because “no one ever got fired for buying/hiring _____.” I hope those days are past us.
Sun Microsystems definitely added value, tons in fact.
Oracle's contributions are less clear-cut, particularly if you don't count all the acquired "achievements."
Sun did engineering. Oracle does business.
I’d be surprised if Oracle released the trademark without a fight to the end. They have a special way of decimating open source projects.
oracle does engineering just fine, and they are actually still around...so maybe Sun was doing it wrong
Quality of engineering and longevity of the company producing the engineered product have nothing to do with each other.
Evaluated by how useful they are to society at large, many businesses should not exist forever--or even for very long. Xerox PARC, Kodak, and Netscape are examples of companies (or, in PARC's case, a division of a company) that contributed significantly to their fields before becoming defunct. Those contributions aren't worsened or inferior, somehow, because the companies that engineered them are gone.
Whether or not a company is still in business only tells you whether a company is good at keeping itself alive. Over time, that quality is increasingly disconnected from whether a company produces valuable goods or services.
only if there is a 1-1 correspondence between engineering acumen and money-making acumen, which I'm sure you already know isn't the case.
The quality of engineering varies wildly within Oracle, to the point that entire divisions can be relied on to produce absolute garbage because longevity completely trumps talent. Oracle Cloud has great engineering (which these days is quite hampered by bureaucracy and misplaced frugality, in my opinion), but outside OCI and a few small select orgs, the situation is dire.
At a couple points my org had hiring crunches and leadership’s short term solution was to find employees from other orgs that could be “loaned” to us. The quality was universally jaw-droppingly low. I had to do code reviews and they would do the craziest junior-developer no-standards stuff that would cause their PRs to get rejected repeatedly, because not only did they make dumb decisions, they didn’t even understand the explanations of why they were dumb decisions. It was infuriating and a horrible waste of time, and the second time around, we tried to say we don’t want that kind of help, but leadership insisted that the free manpower was not optional.
That sort of loaned manpower isn't free, despite management's continued delusions that it is. Loaners have a cost, both up-front (onboarding, mentoring, reviews, etc) and on-going (lack of organic expertise in the new code remaining on the team, maintenance of suboptimal or inconsistent code, etc). But they're not the sorts of costs that show up well on balance sheets, so good luck convincing anyone that they exist.
Who is responsible for the java API updates?
Damn I miss Sun Microsystems products.
But did Sun actually add anything in relation to JavaScript?
The name, it was originally going to be called Livescript.
Those days will probably never be behind us because incentive structures in companies make employees risk averse.
When has Oracle ever added value whatsoever to the tech ecosystem?
If it's an honest question and not just the beginning of a hate-fest, let's think...
Both Java the language and OpenJDK the main runtime & development kit have had much more money and manpower poured into them under Oracle than they ever had previously. Both continue to advance rapidly after almost dying pre-Oracle acquisition.
MySQL 8 (released in 2018) was a massive release that brought many long awaited features (like CTEs) to the database, although MySQL's development have stalled during the past few years.
Oracle employs several Linux kernel developers and is one of major contributors (especially to XFS and btrfs): https://lwn.net/Articles/1022414
Not top 3 or even top 10, but better than most companies out there.
That's all I can remember.
edit: after thinking about it for a couple more minutes, they're also the main developer of GraalVM — the only high quality FOSS AOT compiler for Java (also mentioned by a sibling comment), and are writing one of the major relatively lightweight modern alternatives to Spring (the other two being Micronaut and Quarkus): https://helidon.io
There's also VirtualBox (inherited from Sun). And probably some other things. Although from what I heard you risk being besieged by aggressive Oracle salespeople if they suspect you're using one of the proprietary "extension pack" features. This sort of thing is why I would think very hard before using anything from Oracle.
Made this mistake w VirtualBox once - never again. I ended up somehow running the proprietary version which “phoned home” and some 30 or 60 days later corporate got a call. When it comes to Oracle, I take Nancy Reagan’s advice [0].
LMS/GLAS
>although MySQL's development have stalled during the past few years.
9.0 is finally released and we are now at 9.3. While nothing big or exciting with every release but development is steady. MySQL 8.0 will reach EOL in April 2026 so every should move to 8.4 LTS soon(ish) and 9.7x should also be LTS by then. I know most on HN is about Postgres but modern MySQL is decent. I think a lot of people still have MySQL from 5.0 era. Which is also somewhat true with Java as well.
I think Oracle do contribute lot of open source code, they just dont get the credit or brag about it.
> MySQL 8 (released in 2018)
Many already moved to MariaDB, because development stalled after Oracle bought Sun (which bought MySQL).
I wonder how much of that was due to cursed distro repositories.
I will probably never forget the rage I felt at discovering the reason my scripts broke between Debian versions was because "apt-get install mysql" started silently installing MariaDB instead, which was close but subtly different enough. (I am honestly surprised considering an Oracle trademark is involved, no lawsuits were filed over this.)
MariaDB has seen decent adoption, but it's still an order of magnitude less than MySQL.
I think that postgresql's popularity has also benefited quite a bit from Oracle's acquisition of MySQL
people just like hating on successful companies, a HN special.. I ignore most those types of posts on this site because they are without any merit
I think the Oracle hate goes a bit beyond the generic hatred for successful companies (be it Microsoft, FAANG, etc).
People actually used to like the products that made these companies explode. Windows 2000 was cool; Facebook was cool; Google was cool. Whenever they stop being pure unadulterated evil for a few minutes, very quickly a lot of people are willing to forgive them and welcome them back into polite society.
But as long as most geeks can remember, Oracle has never been cool. At its peak, the company enabled a world of snooty BOFH DBAs, selling unreasonably expensive products to well-oiled middle-managers. And then they started "acqui-squeezing" adjacent products, blackmailing their own customers, and suing everyone in sight. They could cure cancer tomorrow, gifting all the related IPs to the world, and most geeks would still see them as scum trying to whitewash their image - and they would probably be right. There are some great engineers in Oracle, but their management is all that is wrong with capitalism.
From 01979 until about 02000, Oracle's RDBMS software was probably the best in the world, and definitely better than the free-software alternatives like Postgres. (Remember that MariaDB, then named MySQL, didn't become free software until 02000 and didn't support transactions until even later.) For several years after that, it was still the best database for some purposes. And that's true even though the Bastard Database Operators From Hell were present from the very beginning.
SQL is kind of shitty, but the relational database model is so great that it makes up for it. And until the rise of entity component systems, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB, all the decent implementations were proprietary software. Separately, although SQL's implementation of transactions is even more broken than its implementation of the relational model, transactional concurrency is also great enough to make up for SQL, and, again, all the usable implementations used to be proprietary.
This may be a setup but I gotta ask…why the preceding 0 in 01979 and 02000?
Avoiding the y10k bug, obviously.
Just delaying the y100k bug, I’d say
Without knowing your parent: it’s a cultural signifier of the Long Now Foundation.
> From 01979 until about 02000, Oracle's RDBMS software was probably the best in the world, and definitely better than the free-software alternatives like Postgres. [...] For several years after that, it was still the best database for some purposes.
Which RDBMS software has/have become the best in the world after that?
I don't know. Oracle was written to run on a VAXCluster with a shared disk with a seek time in the tens of milliseconds, and things like Postgres are kind of architected for that world. The world has changed a lot. Anything you could fit on disk in 02000 fits in RAM today, most of our programmable computing power is in GPUs instead of CPUs, website workloads are insanely read-heavy (favoring materialized views and readslave farms), SSDs can commit transactions durably in 0.1ms and support random reads while imposing heavy penalties on nonsequential writes, and spinning up ten thousand AWS Lambda functions to process a query in parallel is now a reasonable thing to do.
I think you could make reasonable arguments for SQLite, Postgres, MariaDB, Impala, Hive, HSQLDB, SPARK, Drill, or even Numpy, TensorFlow, or Unity's ECS, though those last few lack the "internal representation independence" ("data independence") so central to Codd's conception.
What's your opinion?
Postgres presumably
As far as I am aware (I may be wrong, or things have changed in the last years) Postgres still is is worse in horizontal scaling than Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server (and likely also DB2).
Maybe, but I think MariaDB beats all of them at that.
Also, though, horizontal scaling is a lot less important now than it was 20 or 30 years ago. https://www.servethehome.com/2025-server-starting-point-inte... says AMD has 192 cores per socket, and you can get two-socket motherboards, so 384 cores total. And you can stick 12 128GiB DDR5-6000 DIMMs in it, so 1.5 tebibytes of RAM, and a single SSD is 30 terabytes, and SSDs can commit a transaction group durably in typically 0.1 milliseconds. And those 384 cores (EPYC 9005, so Zen 5c, https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-9005-turin-turns-trans...) are 2.25GHz and typically about 2.2 instructions per clock (https://chipsandcheese.com/p/zen-5-variants-and-more-clock-f...), and they support AVX512.
As one rough estimate, 2.25GHz with AVX512 (at 1 IPC) means you can do 36 billion column-oriented 32-bit integer operations per core per second, which with 384 cores means 13 trillion 32-bit integer operations per core per second. On one server. So if you have a query that needs to do a linear scan of a column in a 13-million-row table, the query might take 300μs, but you should be able to do a million such queries per second. But normally you index your tables so that most queries don't need to do such inefficient things, so you should be able to handle many more queries per second than that!
(Each socket has 12 DDR5 channels, totaling 576 gigabytes per second to DRAM per socket or 1.13 terabytes per second across the two of them, so you'll get worse performance if you're out of cache. And apparently you can use 512GiB DIMMs and get 6 tebibytes of RAM!)
So, if you need more than one server for your database, it's probably because it's tens or hundreds of terabytes, or because you're handling tens of millions of queries per second, or because your database software is designed for spinning rust. Spinning rust is still the best way to store large databases, but now the cutoff for "large" is approaching the petabyte scale.
I think the space of databases that are under ten terabytes and under ten million queries per second is large enough to cover almost everything that most people think of when they think of "databases".
I don’t love Oracle, but GraalVM is pretty cool. That and the vanilla JVM keeps getting updates.
They've done a ton of stuff with Java, including open-sourcing it in its entirety.
Everyone uses “JavaScript” to describe a language.
Oracle is a parasite.
Honestly, I had no idea JavaScript was even a trademarked name. I've always just assumed it's the name of a programming language and had no idea it had anything to do with Oracle.
I guess I don't feel bad not knowing this though, as the language really does have nothing to do with the company it's insane that they even hold a trademark for it.
Aren’t there laws about this? Where “Kleenex” becomes so universally }}]%^* )!;&
Pretty sure that’s what the whole suit is about.
Animal Well has an item called "flying disc" or something since Frisbee is TM.
To google something has for decades for millenials meant search online in any way.
Trademark law is dumb and inconvenient. Only people owning trademarks disagree.
But so are many other laws. We all just have to follow them all anyway.
Trademark law is what allows me as a consumer to buy a Coke and know I’ll get a Coke.
I find that convenient, despite owning no trademarks.
The benefits are so easily taken for granted as just being normal parts of life.
Just like how we take for granted that you can count on your food label not lying to you and your food not having dangerous ingredients, with proper inspections and such.
But it stops you from getting an equivalent coke from any other vendor, even if you might want to (because it might be cheaper). You're assuming that everyone finds it as important as you do that your “Coke” comes from a specific manufacturer regardless of what the product actually is or contains.
For Coke you might be right about most people (though not me) but there are plenty of products where brand loyalty isn't a thing. People just want some decent hand tissues around, nobody cares if it's made by actual Kleenex.
No.
You're probably thinking of Genericisation. This isn't a law in the sense you probably mean, there is no statute about it, no legislature wrote it, nobody signed anything. Instead Genericisation is a legal doctrine related to the core idea in trademark law that we can't have exclusive use of descriptive marks.
Suppose you make a Big Car and you try to trademark "Big Car" as your exclusive mark for this new product. That's just describing the car, it's generic so you can't do that, it's OK to trademark "Giganticar" or "Waterluvian Car" or something because people can describe what their similar product is with the words "big car" but if you were allowed to own "Big Car" they can't do that.
Genericisation says well, if your product is so successful that now everybody knows what a "Waterluvian" is, and most people shown a new big car from say, Ford, say "Waterluvian" so that even Ford's sales people struggle to teach the guys on the forecourt not to call this a "Waterluvian" - that's now a generic term, you can't stop Ford just saying they're making a Waterluvian.
Genericisation only applies for crazy famous stuff. Kleenex is an example because your mom knows what a kleenex is, the guy who mows your lawn knows, Elon Musk knows, everybody knows, that's actually famous. Javascript probably wouldn't meet that requirement. My mother does not know what Javascript is, my boss does, because he's a software engineer, and maybe the average numerate graduate knows, but I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it.
Dilution is a related idea, also for very famous things. Dilution says for these famous things it's not OK to use the famous mark for any other purpose even though it's not related. So Disney toilet paper isn't OK, Coca-Cola brand vibrators, not OK, and so on. Nobody thinks the vibrator is a beverage, but Coke is so famous that doesn't matter. That doesn't impact here either.
The amount of people that use JavaScript to refer to the Oracle-provided JavaScript is zero, the amount of people who can refer to the Oracle-provided JavaScript over the last 10+ years is zero. Because it isn't a thing. I'm pretty sure that is against trade mark regulations.
Is there a relative component to the evaluation of genericisation? eg., if only truck drivers know about the term Waterluvian, but the vast majority use it in the generic way, then it's generic? Because it would be a relevant update to that law, & apply here
If Oracle win we rename the language JS. JS stands for nothing.
How about OS, where the "S" now stands for "sucks", and the meaning of the "O" is left as an exercise for the reader.
This will cause confusion with OS for "Open Source".
Also "Operating System". This is a feature, not a bug.
We can just start calling it by its full Christian name, Eczemascript
I guees we can use a name from island near Java. BaliScript, MaduraScript, KarimunScript and so on.
Or JoeScript, substituting one slang term for “coffee” for another.
TypeScript is now called DecafScript.
DFCOCScript. "Dee-ef-coc-script" Damn fine cup of coffee Script
Rolls off the tongue
How about douche-named-Larry-script. Take a page out of Apple’s playbook when they used the code name Butthead Astronomer.
https://www.engadget.com/2014-02-26-when-carl-sagan-sued-app...
No, we rename Javascript to Typelessscript.
.Net compiles to it's IL and who writes raw JavaScript these days anyway, so just call it JSIL.
Typescript--
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The cartoon explaining Oracle's org structure feels appropriate:
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/code-review-on-pr...
Deno should start a campaign with the slogan "Did you know that JavaScript has nothing to do with Java? (except for court trials)"
I'd donate.
I don’t mean to be pedantic, but beyond the deliberate syntactic echoes, JavaScript and Java were the first two languages with (incompatible!) object-oriented data models enforced by the runtime to achieve widespread adoption with longevity (sorry, Smalltalk!)
Python was invented earlier, but didn’t see wide use until later.
And that they were both massively accelerated by the level of interest in the early WWW is undeniable. No other general purpose languages can say that except perhaps Perl, and it slowly burned out.
Well, the models were in so far compatible as that JavaScript could access them to some degree from applets. Which is why they picked the name ...
Interesting point, but I'm not able to judge the trutfulness.
So the JVM has a runtime-enforced nominal type system (and object model) with classes.
But JS, to my knowledge, only has primitive types enforced at runtime, and no nomimal class system, unless you basically implement it yourself?
Uh, edit: maybe I get you now, it does have that in a way. But prototype identity and "instanceof" are rarely used in practise.
Maybe I'm missing your point here. Answering at late local time.
It would be so great to have a nominal type system in the browser though.
So many JS librarlies have their own version of it, and it causes insufferable headaches when combined with TypeScript.
Like, they use complicated hacks to make sure that their library objects are not structurall/duck typed.
classes != objects
Yes, the typing and semantic models are wildly different. The point is that they’re primitive in a way that the other widespread alternative, C++, did not inherit from its Cfront heritage.
> classes != objects
that's what I was aiming at, maybe poorly.
There's tons of libraries that use some kind of runtime-observable instance property as a tag, to mimic nominal typing in JS.
The same thing is also possible using prototype identity, if you either use the class keyword syntax sugar introduced with ES5 (?), or if you manually do OOP using prototypes. But the latter is very uncommon.
It seems to be more common to add a property like
$_$_$____superlib__$-inst_WALRUS
Oracle is the definition of legacy. If you’re still using them you’re behind in the market and behind your competitors.
While JavaScript has obviously become generic, why do people actually care to make it official? Has anyone ever gotten in trouble for saying "JavaScript"?
Related: https://javascript.tm/
Hugged to death on my end
Doesn't Oracle stand for "One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison"?
Maybe it’s time to revert to Javascript’s original name: LiveScript.
Can I invent a language called Larry Ellison Script and trademark it
IANAL. But yes I think we can.
Good luck with the cease and desist letters.
Nashorn (the JS engine in the JDK) was the only teeth Oracle had, but they removed it, so what can they truly say they own that supports the fact they're building JavaScript?
GraalJS?
my guess is that they feel there is risk in releasing the javascript trademark to the java trademark.
This is one of the things that makes me believe that humanity has just about run it's course.
oracle holding javascript just froze it ,no one else can touch it ,they not doing anything with it but that nothing is exactly what kept it stable without fights or rebrands or ai company trying to trademark over it. later then it can also open lane for anyone to grab and next holder might not be this quiet. oracle doing nothing ended up protecting it more imo
All the power to you Ryan!
Looking at the reasoning[0]:
> To plead a claim of fraud, petitioner must plead that: (1) respondent made a false representation to the USPTO; (2) respondent had knowledge of the falsity of the representation; (3) the false representation was material to the continued registration of the mark, and (4) respondent made the representation with the intent to deceive the USPTO.
> A claim of fraud must set forth all elements of the claim with a heightened degree of particularity [...] Indeed, “the pleadings [must] contain explicit rather than implied expressions of the circumstances constituting the fraud.” In addition, intent to deceive the USPTO is a specific element of a fraud claim, and must be sufficiently pleaded
> Essentially, Petitioner’s theory of fraud is based on allegations that the specimen of use submitted with Respondent’s maintenance documents do not show use by the proper party. It is well-settled that the proper ground for cancellation is the underlying question of whether the mark was in use in commerce, not the adequacy of the specimens [...] the insufficiency of the specimens, per se, does not constitute grounds for cancellation; the proper ground for cancellation is that the term has not been used as a mark
To file for a mark or renewal of a mark and claim ownership of something you do not own is insane. It's not like this is a 5 second process or that there isn't a lot of money riding on this-- this sort of thing is super serious and incredibly important! You're telling me no one at Oracle or their counsel was able to catch this in review before filing? As far as I can tell, in the renewal for the mark[1], Node.js was the sole specimen provided as an example of mark use! Come on...
EDIT: Sorry, correction, they have three specimens attached to the renewal, two of which seem to be the same. Clearly an insurmountable amount of work and too complicated to validate.
[0]: https://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pno=92086835&pty=CAN&eno...
[1]: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn75026640&docI...
IANAL, but I don't think your analysis is quite correct.
I think the key is
> It is well-settled that the proper ground for cancellation is the underlying question of whether the mark was in use in commerce, not the adequacy of the specimens
If I understand correctly (and I very well might not), that means that it doesn't matter whether some of the provided specimens were fraudulent or not, in order to revoke the trademark the burden of proof is to show the entire trademark claim was fraudulent, and if there was no fraud, then the trademark wouldn't have been granted.
Deno might be able to make a stronger argument of fraud, if they could show without that specimen USPTO would have rejected the application, or that the other specimen was also invalid, but that would delay the proceedings and require more work for them.
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One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
I might not be popular for this but JavaScript is indeed a trademark which Oracle rightfully owns these days. This is fair play.
However, I do believe the word has been diluted and genericized and hope the USPTO chooses to release it.
A good argument to avoid losing a trademark to genericization is to show that there is an actual generic term that overlaps with the trademark, but then the trademark is not the generic term itself.
Examples:
Nintendo → Video Game Console
Post-it → Sticky Note
Xerox → Photocopy
etc ...
In the case of JavaScript, there's no generic term to allude to; JavaScript is the generic term, which might weigh towards the argument of genericization.
> JavaScript is indeed a trademark which Oracle rightfully owns these days
Err, that's not a given by any stretch. This is exactly what the suit is trying to prove. They are not a rightful holder of the trademark. They've failed to show use in commerce, and one of their examples of use was someone else's.
But it is an Oracle trademark, [1].
And here's one (trivial, but valid) use of it [2].
I'm sure Ellison lawyer's can come up with thousands of examples of JavaScript being used within the context of Oracle's business activities.
The way to go is fight for genericization (or start calling it ECMAScript, lmao).
1: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75026640&caseSearchType=U...
2: https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2...
That 2nd example is a pretty bad example of JavaScript being used as a Oracle trademark.
Id argue the opposite. The wording makes no reference to oracles ownership of the product or name that is JavaScript. And ECMA is reffered to as the "maker" of the standard.
If anything, this is an example by Oracle themselves using the trademark in a generic context.
Its like cocacola calling themselves "a producer of fanta" and referring to a the food and drug administration to define what that means.
I doubt the writer of that doc was aware that Oracle owns the JavaScript trademark.
Oracle develops, maintains, and sells 2 different JavaScript runtimes. They’re definitely using it.
So do many other entities.
Oracle does not control the specification of the language (ECMA does), nor does it own rights to the original implementation (I believe Mozilla does).
wow, they filed for it in 1995? that’s wayyy before Node.Js or Dahl came on the scene. Or before the language even mattered that much.
Yes.
Even though one may not like it, the trademark fairly belongs to Oracle.
Again, that's the point of the suit. It likely does not.
These (along with Kleenex) are common examples of genericization, yet I assume through diligence on the part of those brands, I hear and see the actual generic terms used far more frequently. For example, I've never heard anyone under the age of 70 (by now) use "Nintendo" to mean any video game console. "Sticky note", "photocopy", and "tissue" are terms I personally hear used much more frequently than "Post-it", "Xerox", or "Kleenex", respectively.
But for "JavaScript"? What else is there? "JS"?
Edit: I guess there's "ECMAScript", but who actually says that (aside when they legally need to)?
I've only heard Xerox be used like that once in my life. I was so confused what a company that invented the mouse had to do with what the person was talking about.
Wouldn’t the generic term be ECMAscript? I realize that that is a stupid name that no one wants to use.
Imagine toiling all those years to make J* products usable, only to have Larry Ellison bigfoot everything.
ughmmm.so squatting.
>Everyone uses “JavaScript” to describe a language—not a brand.
It can be both.
>Everyone knows JavaScript isn’t an Oracle product
But older people should know that it was a Sun product and Oracle bought Sun.
Edit: Sun actually only licensed the name. But in the renewal it points to an Oracle product called Oracle JavaScript Extention Toolkit.
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn75026640&docI...
But it was never a Sun product? Java was a Sun product, giving JavaScript a name with "Java" in it was the mistake that created this whole mess.
Rename it GoScript this time around.
It was livescript originally.
Java is a Sun product, but Java has nothing to do with Javascript except a confusing name overlap.
Javascript was written at Netscape.
The JavaScript name came out of a cross-licensing deal between Netscape and Sun where Netscape would bundle a copy of the JVM with their browser. Sun needed a way to put the JVM on most Windows users' computers to get developers to write Java software instead of Windows software, and they knew Microsoft wouldn't ship a product that would threaten the Windows platform's domination, so they figured that bundling with Netscape was their next best option. If you read the initial JavaScript press release ( https://www.tech-insider.org/java/research/1995/1204.html ), it's mainly marketed as a way to write glue code to make it possible for Java applets (where the real application logic would go) to interact with an HTML page:
> With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent form that performs loan payment or currency exchange calculations right on the client in response to user input. A multimedia weather forecast applet written in Java can be scripted by JavaScript to display appropriate images and sounds based on the current weather readings in a region. A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. A page might contain JavaScript scripts that run on both the client and the server. On the server, the scripts might dynamically compose and format HTML content based on user preferences stored in a relational database, and on the client, the scripts would glue together an assortment of Java applets and HTML form elements into a live interactive user interface for specifying a net-wide search for information.
> Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects, so the range of live online applications that dynamically present information to and interact with users over enterprise networks or the Internet is virtually unlimited. Netscape will support Java and JavaScript in client and server products as well as programming tools and applications to make this vision a reality.
> "Programmers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Java because it was designed from the ground up for the Internet. JavaScript is a natural fit, since it's also designed for the Internet and Unicode-based worldwide use," said Bill Joy, co-founder and vice president of research at Sun. "JavaScript will be the most effective method to connect HTML-based content to Java applets."
This was all implemented, and Java applets had full interoperability with JavaScript. Applets could call JavaScript functions, and JavaScript functions could call applet methods. Of course over time people gave up on Java applets and JavaScript became a good enough language to write real application logic directly in it. It's true that JavaScript now has virtually nothing to do with Java, but that wasn't the case initially, and the name has at least some logic behind it.
Ah, great background.
One more tidbit I just learned: there was a Netscape/Sun deal around the name, so the registered trademark has some legal history. It's not that Sun (and then Oracle) just claimed rights to something Netscape made.
No. I was around then and nobody thought of JS as a Sun product.
I'm trying to imagine the alternative history where James Gosling was given several days to develop a workable in-browser scripting language instead of Brendan Eich.
This seems like such a pain in the ass to fight. Why not just rename the language? Most people are done with js anyway and just use ts.
Btw, The language is called ECMAScript
Literally nobody, outside of formal documents and perhaps pedants, uses that catastrophe of a name.
no it's not, that's a bureaucratic hoop-jump
If you are gonna change the name to anything, change it to js. But also, don’t change the name of the language, especially not to ECMAScript.
It is already called ECMAScript; they do not need to change it. It is also called JavaScript. (I don't know if there is trademark issues with ECMA too though)
However, the name "JavaScript" (and "ECMAScript") is in use enough anyways (like is described in the article), so Oracle shouldn't properly restrict others to use it in this way.
Does everyone else pronounce that as "eczema script", too?
"EnemaScript"
I mean, I don't think of it as a rebuke of JavaScript. I've just found it to be the most natural pronunciation for that sequence of letters. I really can't read it any other way.
I'd like to believe that most people have switched over to TS but I wouldn't count on it until I've seen the numbers, which I am currently too lazy to look up.
"We're now firmly in the TypeScript era. 67% of respondents stated they write more TypeScript than JavaScript code – while the single largest group consisted of people who only write TypeScript."
Nice to hear, thanks.
just call it typescript or webscript or something and stop wasting your time losers.
> a screenshot of the Node.js website to show use of the “JavaScript” trademark. As the creator of Node.js, I find that especially offensive.
There is some irony in that Ryan isn’t acknowledging Node.js own trademark in his post, given that he was the person who announced the Node.js trademark.
https://nodejs.org/en/blog/uncategorized/trademark
So he wants Node.js trademark to be acknowledged, but doesn’t acknowledge it himself.
Oracle wants the JavaScript trademark acknowledged, and he doesn’t want to acknowledge that either.
This all seems very silly to me.
"Don't knowledge it" because he did not put a stupid TM sign in every blog posts he writes mentioning Node.js is a stretch.
There’s no acknowledgment of Node.js trademark on Deno.com … and the landing page is largely about how much better Deno is over Node.js.
Of all places to put trademark acknowledgement, it’d be there - and it’s missing.
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Ryan's post explaining the decision to trademark node seems pretty reasonable to me. Does Oracle have a similarly credible justification for maintaining the JavaScript trademark?
AFAIK Sun gave Netscape free use of the JavaScript Trademark purely to side with Netscape against Microsoft in the browser wars, language wars, etc. I would think there is still something related to the original agreement.
It looks like JScript is still trademarked by Microsoft, why not ask them to do whatever the community thinks is right for ECMAScript names and then we can all refer to the language a little faster?
I feel like misplaced criticism.
Javascript has become such a ubiquitous term that its copyright status is increasingly tenuous. Node.js by contrast has no such problem, yet. Most of the industry supports this initiative, and dumping on the people willing to invest the time and money to fix it once and for all, over seemingly irrelevant things feels petty.
Trademark is not copyright.
Node is about to become irrelevant. As soon as Microsoft ships TypeScript 7.
Why will TypeScript 7 make Node.js irrelevant?
In TypeScript 7, the compiler will be written in Go instead of TS. But the compiler will still produce JS code as its output and so Node.js is still relevant for running that JS code.
Or is there something else about TypeScript 7 that will make Node.js irrelevant?
How does a 10x faster TS to JS compiler make a JS runtime irrelevant?
Typescript 7 is not a replacement for node, it is a language spec and compiler, but Bun _could_ be the preferred choice for dev using a Javascript runtime.
bun is not faster than node, why do people keep thinking this lmao. v8 runtime is like x4 more performant than spidermonkey which is what bun uses.
Can you elaborate? Are you conflating node and javascript?
You made a fool of yourself.
This looks like a distraction from Deno company.
Everyone knows what powers companies like Oracle, so it isn't as if they would given up on this, unless told so by the courts.
Maybe Deno the company should focus on making their actual business case, why pay for Deno instead of using node?
>why pay for Deno
Pay for Deno? I never had to do that, what am I doing wrong?
You're not using their SaaS platform, which like Vercel with Next.js, is what keeps development rolling in.
What many are doing wrong is not paying for our tools like in other professions, and then acting surprised when the authors decide to pivot for something else, when funding dries out.
Crafted by Rajat
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