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.
burnte · 53s ago
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.
homebrewer · 1h ago
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.
muglug · 25m ago
> 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.
Lerc · 7m ago
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.
aleph_minus_one · 14m ago
>
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.
ksec · 1h ago
>by simply updating CDDL
How about a simpler solution, just relicense everything to BSD / MIT.
ndiddy · 12m ago
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.
saghm · 5m ago
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.
drdaeman · 1h ago
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.
johannes1234321 · 4m ago
Back when Oracle acquired Sun they told us "Sun had more lawyers per capita than we"
vips7L · 16m ago
It’s a huge company with different divisions.
Oracle is one of the leading researchers in JIT compilers, garbage collectors, and language interpreters.
arp242 · 1h ago
Lawnmowers are incapable of caring about goodwill.
randyrand · 4m ago
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.
WD-42 · 1h ago
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.
hn_throwaway_99 · 1h ago
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".
lovich · 45m ago
These are all the result of the 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.
aleph_minus_one · 1m ago
> 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.
snickerdoodle12 · 34m ago
Goodwill isn't "nothing", but good luck explaining that to a lawyer.
NBJack · 1h ago
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 simply responded "it's standing policy".
theturtle32 · 26m ago
"soul"? Oracle never had one in the first place.
justinator · 47m ago
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.
tgma · 24m ago
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.
relativeadv · 1h ago
Oracle is doing something petty and absurd? Are you sure?
kstrauser · 15m ago
The hell, you say!
lvl155 · 2h ago
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.
Someone1234 · 1h ago
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."
gardnr · 1h ago
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.
beanjuiceII · 1h ago
oracle does engineering just fine, and they are actually still around...so maybe Sun was doing it wrong
zbentley · 36m ago
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.
hamburglar · 40m ago
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.
quest88 · 50m ago
Who is responsible for the java API updates?
reddalo · 1h ago
Damn I miss Sun Microsystems products.
raverbashing · 1h ago
But did Sun actually add anything in relation to JavaScript?
mosdl · 1h ago
The name, it was originally going to be called Livescript.
osigurdson · 2h ago
Those days will probably never be behind us because incentive structures in companies make employees risk averse.
fluidcruft · 1h ago
When has Oracle ever added value whatsoever to the tech ecosystem?
homebrewer · 1h ago
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
arp242 · 1h ago
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.
ksec · 47m ago
>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.
timeon · 40m ago
> MySQL 8 (released in 2018)
Many already moved to MariaDB, because development stalled after Oracle bought Sun (which bought MySQL).
tomnipotent · 30m ago
MariaDB has seen decent adoption, but it's still an order of magnitude less than MySQL.
beanjuiceII · 1h ago
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
toyg · 23m ago
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.
kragen · 3m ago
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 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.
tombert · 1h ago
I don’t love Oracle, but GraalVM is pretty cool. That and the vanilla JVM keeps getting updates.
ternaryoperator · 1h ago
They've done a ton of stuff with Java, including open-sourcing it in its entirety.
jennyholzer · 2h ago
Everyone uses “JavaScript” to describe a language.
Oracle is a parasite.
Fogest · 28m ago
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.
Waterluvian · 1h ago
Aren’t there laws about this? Where “Kleenex” becomes so universally }}]%^* )!;&
WD-42 · 1h ago
Pretty sure that’s what the whole suit is about.
tialaramex · 57m ago
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.
90s_dev · 1h ago
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.
sokoloff · 6m ago
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.
nailer · 2h ago
If Oracle win we rename the language JS. JS stands for nothing.
throwawayoldie · 2h ago
How about OS, where the "S" now stands for "sucks", and the meaning of the "O" is left as an exercise for the reader.
brian-armstrong · 55m ago
We can just start calling it by its full Christian name, Eczemascript
jm4 · 26m ago
How about douche-named-Larry-script. Take a page out of Apple’s playbook when they used the code name Butthead Astronomer.
.Net compiles to it's IL and who writes raw JavaScript these days anyway, so just call it JSIL.
pavlov · 1h ago
Typescript--
moritzwarhier · 2h ago
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.
twoodfin · 15m ago
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.
Can I invent a language called Larry Ellison Script and trademark it
spullara · 21m ago
my guess is that they feel there is risk in releasing the javascript trademark to the java trademark.
bobajeff · 2h ago
This is one of the things that makes me believe that humanity has just about run it's course.
mbStavola · 2h ago
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
From what I understand, TTAB is stating that simply showing that Oracle improperly submitting Node.js as a use of mark does not constitute fraud because the intent to deceive was not explicit. It's a bit frustrating because if its not _fradulent_ the only thing I am left to believe is that they were _negligent_.
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.
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.
nkrisc · 1h ago
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)?
charcircuit · 13m ago
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.
mmastrac · 1h ago
> 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.
moralestapia · 1h ago
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).
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.
fc417fc802 · 1h ago
Rename it GoScript this time around.
mosdl · 1h ago
It was livescript originally.
scosman · 2h ago
Java is a Sun product, but Java has nothing to do with Javascript except a confusing name overlap.
Javascript was written at Netscape.
nailer · 2h ago
No. I was around then and nobody thought of JS as a Sun product.
adolph · 1h ago
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.
zeroCalories · 2h ago
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.
jenadine · 2h ago
Btw, The language is called ECMAScript
mmastrac · 1h ago
Literally nobody, outside of formal documents and perhaps pedants, uses that catastrophe of a name.
ajkjk · 1h ago
no it's not, that's a bureaucratic hoop-jump
runarberg · 35m ago
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.
echelon · 1h ago
Does everyone else pronounce that as "eczema script", too?
wiseowise · 52m ago
"EnemaScript"
throwawayoldie · 2h ago
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.
oceansky · 56m ago
"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."
> 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.
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?
Someone1234 · 1h ago
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.
torstenvl · 20m ago
Trademark is not copyright.
flkenosad · 2h ago
Node is about to become irrelevant. As soon as Microsoft ships TypeScript 7.
cakoose · 2h ago
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?
cluckindan · 2h ago
How does a 10x faster TS to JS compiler make a JS runtime irrelevant?
roman_soldier · 1h ago
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.
wiseowise · 50m ago
You made a fool of yourself.
rockwotj · 2h ago
Can you elaborate? Are you conflating node and javascript?
Their stock is 50% higher than it was a year ago.
Not quite sure this is doing them damage.
ZFS can be run under Linux - combining the Linux kernel with ZFS is a collective work (collection) of two independent works.
How about a simpler solution, just relicense everything to BSD / MIT.
Oracle is one of the leading researchers in JIT compilers, garbage collectors, and language interpreters.
I’m not sure if that’s even possible under US law though.
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".
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/principal-agent-problem...
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.
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.
It literally wouldn't surprise me if when asked, the legal simply responded "it's standing policy".
Whoever thinks it's a good idea to bet on the altruism of a giant faceless corporation is dumb.
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.
Oracle's contributions are less clear-cut, particularly if you don't count all the acquired "achievements."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Many already moved to MariaDB, because development stalled after Oracle bought Sun (which bought MySQL).
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.
Oracle is a parasite.
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.
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.
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.
I find that convenient, despite owning no trademarks.
https://www.engadget.com/2014-02-26-when-carl-sagan-sued-app...
I'd donate.
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.
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...
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.
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)?
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.
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...
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...
Javascript was written at Netscape.
https://2024.stateofjs.com/en-US/usage/
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.
Of all places to put trademark acknowledgement, it’d be there - and it’s missing.
https://deno.com/
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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.
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?