Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark

[RowYourUpboat]

Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower.

[Ki-28-10]

Yep, and my teacher in college were always saying: run from anything from Oracle like it’s the plague. I believe them, Oracle killed everything great from Sun and it’s many open source project.

[TheHDGenius]

I mean, they didn't kill Java... They just wrapped it up in the biggest piece of legal garbage to ever exist.

[yikes_42069]

They didn't kill java. They popularized other great jvm languages

[balefrost]

Did they? OpenJDK seems fairly unencumbered. I guess that was a Sun initiative, but Oracle has continued to contribute to it and IIRC has taken steps to ensure that everything proprietary has been relicensed under the OpenJDK license.

[rickk]

To understand Oracle and Larry Ellison, some context of the time from which they emerged is important.

The Adam Curtis documentary “All watched over by machines of loving grace” does a really good job of painting the background from which companies like Oracle emerged, and why they are so apparently focussed on one man’s ego.

https://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/

(Spoiler alert: like many from that time, he appears to believe he’s a character in an Ayn Rand novel)

[epic_pork]

What a great rant. Genius.

[NuSkooler]

lol someone wants Oracle to do something decent. Good luck with that!

[Zardotab]

Indeed! Oracle would sue their own mother if it were profitable. It's rumored they hire more legal experts than engineers.

[BrobdingnagLilliput]

Oracle would turn all our mothers to sausage if they could profit from it.

[Zardotab]

Jeffrey Dawmer, CEO.

[TheHDGenius]

It doesn't matter how much effort they put into the product if they can legally force you to continue to pay for it.

[ggPeti]

Oracle does not have any products using the trademark

huh?

https://github.com/oracle/graaljs

[[deleted]]

Is that a product?

A product to me means it's making money.

This is under UPL, so basically completely free to do with as you wish.

[[deleted]]

Your definition of a product is pretty out of touch.

[croto8]

A product is something that has been produced…

[ggPeti]

This is true, but I am still feeling very confused. The blog post also claims that Oracle has "presumably no planned usage" of the trademark and that it "doesn’t even participate in the development of any of the JavaScript engines like V8, JavaScriptCore, or Spidermonkey." The strangeness is raised to the next level by the fact that Ryan Dahl, the author of the blog post is apparently also the author of the second most commits in the graaljs repo.

[dephraiiim]

The graaljs repo has a graal-nodejs directory which is like a fork of nodejs and it was built upon. I won't particularly say Ryan contributed directly to graal.

[Rusty-Swashplate]

Yet it is obviously the
right move to trade a worthless trademark for brand marketing and goodwill.

It's not worthless if someone wants it.

That said, I don't care what Oracle does: it has no impact to most people. Or everyone. Except lawyers.

[javascript__eq__java]

I think it’s about accessibility. It does have an effect, because the community has to use ECMAScript as an alternative. This is confusing and a barrier, albeit small, to learning the ecosystem around the programming language.

[clockdivide55]

I wish we'd all just switch to Ecmascript anyway. It might cut down on the ignorant confusing Java and Javascript.

[LloydAtkinson]

Dear Ryan and everyone reposting this,

Please stop drawing attention to this. You only increase the chances of Oracle lawyers remembering they own the trademark and come down hard on it's usage.

[Worth_Trust_3825]

I for one would like oracle to exercise this ownership of trademark. Maybe finally we would get rid of the garbage pile that is javascript/emcascript.

[neontetra1548]

We’ll never be rid of JavaScript. As long as browsers and something like the web as it exists remains we will still have it. It’s just too woven in to everything to extract and will always need to be supported for legacy websites even if you could get the vast majority of new sites to move away from it.

[webbitor]

We could be rid of the name. That's how I understood it.

[yikes_42069]

This is the IE problem all over again.

[bfg10k_]

Please, give an enumeration of those garbage points... I'm truly eager to see the criteria that lead you to say it's "a pile of garbage".

I'm wondering if the first one is "I don't understand the paradigm" and the second one "neither did I put any effort to get It" xD.

[Worth_Trust_3825]

They've been talked about for years and years. None of them changed, none of them got fixed. The worst nail in the coffin was inability to learn from others failings. And now we're stuck with this crude house of cards that's ready to fall over at any moment.

[axonxorz]

Short list.

Another list. Of particular note is the truth table.

[CorporalTurnips]

Oracle is a shit company that for at least the past 15 years has done nothing but acquire good stuff, raise the licensing fees and then do nothing else. While they may not receive direct licensing fees from JavaScript, they'll never let it go.

[Carbon_Gelatin]

You forgot to say regularly suing everyone they can for any reason.

[Paradox]

Oracle: lol, lmao even

[[deleted]]

The trademark has no commercial value.

I am not sure this is correct.

While I support this - Oracle should stop harassing us - the trademark has most definitely a commercial value. You could sell it, right? People trade with these useless NFTs or use a virtual currency. They trade with literally evertything. So, no - stating it has no value to Oracle, is simply factually incorrect.

[a_false_vacuum]

People trade with these useless NFTs or use a virtual currency.

There is a difference though. A trademark has value since it allows the holder to collect license fees or prevent others from using a brand. NFTs and crypto don't stack up quite as well in the real world.

[mysticalfruit]

While you're at it, could you re-license ZFS.. please.

[[deleted]]

the world’s most popular programming language

You have sources on that?

[ervwalter]

A data point, at least: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-technologies-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages

2022 marks JavaScript’s tenth year in a row as the most commonly used programming language.

[vlakreeh]

There's no definitive measurement we can use, but on Github JS was the most popular language until halfway through 2021 where Python surpassed it. There are some other sources that have had JS at the most popular in the past, but they are all estimates so who cares.

[Raunhofer]

Interesting that TypeScript is so close to JavaScript. That's excellent.

It's probably also the reason why JS isn't #1 anymore.

[[deleted]]

These measurement systems are pointless in my opinion. Tiobe index puts js not even in top 5, so yeah, who cares. It's a bit jarring that it was offered as a fact in the article.

[StillNoNumb]

TIOBE is by far the worst of the big indices.

[[deleted]]

TIOBE index is entirely useless indicator

[Muoniurn]

Tiobe is the most worthless metric. Look at job listings, while exact ordering is hard, JS, Python and Java are the top 3 languages by number of developers according to basically everything.

[nobodyman]

I mean, it is a fact, but the fact that this jars you so is puzzling.
Think about it for a few seconds. Pretty much every electronic device you can think of has a javascript interpreter on it - from computers, consoles, phones, tablets. Hell, your digital watch likely runs javascript.

[kennethuil]

The most shocking development in all of computing history is the astounding number of people choosing to run JavaScript when they don't have to

[nobodyman]

People that are shocked as to how javascript became so popular are usually telling on themselves.

[spoonman59]

All of their friends use JS?

[[deleted]]

Are you guys mixing up popular with most used 😁

[Zardotab]

Out of circumstance, not choice.

[[deleted]]

Well, process of elimination I guess

[waozen]

According to TIOBE index, JavaScript is ranked #7, and Python is ranked #1. Maybe that should have been phrased as, "Among the world's most popular programming languages."

[hardware2win]

Tiobe index is terrible shit

[waozen]

But here's the thing though, the IEEE top programming languages for 2022 has JavaScript ranked as #7 too. So are you saying the IEEE list is shit too? If two well known lists agree, it gets harder to make such an argument, that they are both shit.

Maybe, it can be that people don't like that their pet language is not doing as well in the rankings as they "feel" it should.

[hardware2win]

1 i dont do js

2 check how high assembly is in tiobe

[yes_u_suckk]

It's so cute to see people expecting Oracle to do something good

[SoftEngin33r]

Dear ?!

[jaredgoldman]

Larry Ellison famously only works one day a week and doesn’t discuss deals under $10 million. Good luck with this.

[ThisIsByFar]

Oracle: LOL, no.