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.
It probably would’ve been a good idea to invent a usable name other than ECMAScript as an alternative, and move away from JavaScript a long time ago. JavaScript is now here to stay as a name though, and it definitely makes no sense for Oracle to own it.
Brendan Eich famously spent only 10 days creating the first version of JavaScript, a dynamic programming language with a rough syntactic lineage from Sun’s Java language
Every time I see this, I wonder what point is trying to be made.
Is it:
that JavaScript is so simple that it only took 10 days?
that JavaScript is so derivative that it only took 10 days?
that JavaScript is poorly thought out due to only taking 10 days?
that Brendan Eich is some kind of genius language designer and implementer?
that JavaScript was never intended for the extended usage it has received?
I suspect the point being made is usually a combination of some these, but it’s a very odd point to continually be brought up outside of “JavaScript is not really fit for purpose” discussions.
Every time I see this, I wonder what point is trying to be made.
That’s become such a common refrain when speaking about JavaScript I’m not sure it really has any meaning anymore. It’s like everytime you introduce Steve Jobs you mention Apple Computers. You’re not trying to say anything other than he’s famous for having started Apple Computers. JavaScript is famous for being invented in ten days by Brendan Eich.
The ‘10 days’ is probably more a reference to retrofitting the original Scheme-like interpreter into LiveScript, which was later renamed JavaScript. Two weeks to rework the grammar and lexer of an existing interpreter into something more like what JS became is pretty plausible and implies none of those questions.
I read it as “it’s not so novel that it deserved a trademark or copyright in the first place and would not have (and has not) been a product in the marketplace”, personally.
To be honest if this issue is actually live, have any of the random conferences (or the CEOs of web companies concerned about this who are signatories) just pay a lawyer to file the USPTO petition. Asking for pro bono lawyer work for this thing in a universe where “JavaScript” is printed everywhere… if you believe it’s so clear cut maybe put your money where your mouth is!
Glib because it’s not my money, of course. But I also do not care. If Oracle sued me tomorrow for all my uses of JS I would simply just change everything to ECMAScript. Just feels like a lawyer problem and there’s so much money slushing around in these companies.
There can be “real” trademark issues… for a long time there was a Japanese company “squatting” the Python trademark in Japan and making real legal threats to random people… maybe Oracle is doing this, but I feel like it would show up on one of these websites.
Weird to argue JavaScript has become a generic term. It’s a programming language (ECMAScript I guess), and if it were different it wouldn’t be JavaScript, it’d be WhateverScript.
I, too, wish the page included a date. For future reference, the Wayback Machine’s first saved version of this page is from today (2024-09-16), suggesting that the page was only publicized recently.
So how did this actually happen in the first place?
Was it because Sun owned the rights to Java so seized the Javascript name as well, or because Javascript was invented by Netscape and the Enterprise part of Netscape ended up inside Sun?
according to an earlier version of this request and the news linked from there it happened because of an agreement between Sun and Netscape back when JS was created: https://tinyclouds.org/trademark
Remember: “Never fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison” -Brian Cantrill https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=34m00s
More of the quote,
It probably would’ve been a good idea to invent a usable name other than ECMAScript as an alternative, and move away from JavaScript a long time ago. JavaScript is now here to stay as a name though, and it definitely makes no sense for Oracle to own it.
Every time I see this, I wonder what point is trying to be made.
Is it:
I suspect the point being made is usually a combination of some these, but it’s a very odd point to continually be brought up outside of “JavaScript is not really fit for purpose” discussions.
It’s usually “it was poorly thought out”, but also not true: https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/did-brendan-eich-really-make-javascript-in-10-days/
That’s become such a common refrain when speaking about JavaScript I’m not sure it really has any meaning anymore. It’s like everytime you introduce Steve Jobs you mention Apple Computers. You’re not trying to say anything other than he’s famous for having started Apple Computers. JavaScript is famous for being invented in ten days by Brendan Eich.
That it’s such a cobbled together mess of complexity. Making it simple would have taken a lot longer.
“Please forgive the long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
― Blaise Pascal
The ‘10 days’ is probably more a reference to retrofitting the original Scheme-like interpreter into LiveScript, which was later renamed JavaScript. Two weeks to rework the grammar and lexer of an existing interpreter into something more like what JS became is pretty plausible and implies none of those questions.
I read it as “it’s not so novel that it deserved a trademark or copyright in the first place and would not have (and has not) been a product in the marketplace”, personally.
someone on the orange site has been peddling just using JS for that, and to me it seems like a not terrible idea.
To be honest if this issue is actually live, have any of the random conferences (or the CEOs of web companies concerned about this who are signatories) just pay a lawyer to file the USPTO petition. Asking for pro bono lawyer work for this thing in a universe where “JavaScript” is printed everywhere… if you believe it’s so clear cut maybe put your money where your mouth is!
Glib because it’s not my money, of course. But I also do not care. If Oracle sued me tomorrow for all my uses of JS I would simply just change everything to ECMAScript. Just feels like a lawyer problem and there’s so much money slushing around in these companies.
There can be “real” trademark issues… for a long time there was a Japanese company “squatting” the Python trademark in Japan and making real legal threats to random people… maybe Oracle is doing this, but I feel like it would show up on one of these websites.
It’s a reasonable request.
Having worked at Oracle and dealt with Dark Helmet quite a bit, my advice is simple: Don’t hold your breath.
Also, please free SPARC.
SPARC has been free for a very long time. And also dead.
Next, do ZFS!
ZFS is already free :)
Are you sure? My naive USPTO search shows the mark “ZFS” first registered by Oracle America, Inc. in April 2014 and renewed May 2024. https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn85901629
But ZFS is a different beast in the sense that Oracle has not abandoned the trademark as the JavaScript article argues. Oracle still advertises this: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-1448/zfsover-1.html
Does this mean that renaming the version used with Linux is an option? Since it’s essentially an old fork?
Weird to argue JavaScript has become a generic term. It’s a programming language (ECMAScript I guess), and if it were different it wouldn’t be JavaScript, it’d be WhateverScript.
I wish the page said the date it was published.
The little postage stamp next to the address at the top says “September 16, 2024”. Its super low contrast and pretty hard to read
I, too, wish the page included a date. For future reference, the Wayback Machine’s first saved version of this page is from today (2024-09-16), suggesting that the page was only publicized recently.
So how did this actually happen in the first place?
Was it because Sun owned the rights to Java so seized the Javascript name as well, or because Javascript was invented by Netscape and the Enterprise part of Netscape ended up inside Sun?
according to an earlier version of this request and the news linked from there it happened because of an agreement between Sun and Netscape back when JS was created: https://tinyclouds.org/trademark