Oracle urged again to surrender JavaScript trademark

nkat2112@sh.itjust.works to Programming@programming.dev – 289 points – Oracle urged again to surrender JavaScript trademark
theregister.com

This article makes for an interesting read. Here follow two early paragraphs for context:

Oracle controls the JavaScript trademark because in 2009 it acquired Sun Microsystems, which applied to trademark the name with the US Patent and Trademark Office back in 1995. The trademark was granted in 2000.

While the database giant does not use the name for any commercial products, its ownership of the trademark has led JavaScript-oriented organizations such as events biz JSConf to adopt branding that avoids the term. As the signatories to the letter observe, the world's most popular programming language therefore can't have a conference that mentions what it's about.

Toward the end, the article mentions an initiative to legally pursue Oracle for trademark abandonment.

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Just call it Ecmascript and be done with it. The name JavaScript was misleading from the beginning. Well, Ecma sounds like a skin disease but who cares.

Ecmascript is classic, but WebScript might be better going forward.

"I need some more [input] sanitizer for my eczema script, the console is red and inflamed whenever I check it."

but then we have a massive problem that affects millions of people if we call it EcmaScript. POJO becomes POEO, which violates English. Anyone speaking or writing English is negatively affected by the change from POJO to POEO. We should definitely pay Oracle billions of dollars to avoid confusing people about whether it's POI-oh or POYO... keep it POJO.

I feel like the modern name for it would be just "Script".

That's way too broad. Scripting is a pretty broad concept.

The only thing worse than Oracle are Oracle sales people.

oracles lawyers are pretty bad too

I put the lawyers under Oracle since they are the physical manifestation of the corporation. Think of Oracle as "crack" and Oracle Sales as "crack dealers". Each horrible in their own special way.

Cool! Oracle, a company famous for making good-will decisions, and open to being "urged" into doing the right thing. 🙄

I suppose the open letter is a nice gesture, and I hope that the petition to cancel the trademark succeeds.

In one fell swoop they managed to gobble up quite a lot of FOSS projects, triggering quite a lot of forks...

Sun Solaris was my first *nix, and I have very strong memories of hanging out in the cluster of Sun machines as well as running a remote x window session from whatever overlocked Celeron win2k machine I had in my dorm at the time.

If it's such a problem, maybe we just collectively move on to ES or TypeScript nomenclature?

Typescript and JavaScript are different languages and the distinction is important, especially because the two are used in conjunction with each other.

Especially because TypeScript compiles down to JavaScript JS

Yeah but why would you ever use javascript instead of typescript.

Don't answer that. 😂

For an application? Never. I'd still use it for something very small like a build script where the hassle of separate compile and run stages makes the whole thing a hassle to use. That might change now, though, since I think Node has gained the ability to execute Typescript directly.

Been using vite for a while and haven't had to think about it.

Glad node is catching up. But it'd spare even more headaches if it natively supported ES6 modules

The article mentions that the letter indicated intent to petition with the USPTO to cancel the Javascript trademark due to abandonment. Hopefully that is successful since that seems to be the best outcome short of Oracle willingly forfeiting it.

Fuck Oracle, we use them for our org and holy fuck, slow to respond, hire people that don't know how to do their job or just don't do it.

Waste of fucking money and air.

Javascript? What's that? I only know of ECMA-262-ECMAScript, rolls right off the tongue!