Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js and Deno, wrote an open letter to Oracle, pleading with the company to release its JavaScript trademark into the public domain.
“Trademarks are a dark cloud over the world’s most popular programming language,” he wrote. “A cautiously law-abiding engineer would turn backwards to avoid its use, leading to confusing terminology like ECMAScript.”
Dahl links to the original 1995 Netscape Communications press release announcing JavaScript. Regardless of the trademark, the language’s name has long confused those who imagine it to be a variant of Java. At the time, Netscape said that JavaScript “complements and integrates with Java”, and the idea was that it could interact with his Java applets on Web pages. However, that integration is superficial, and JavaScript has little in common with the Java language, other than that they are both “curly brace” languages.
JavaScript inventor Brendan Eich said last month, “The name is a total lie. It has very little to do with Java, and it has little to do with its common syntactic ancestor, C.”
Trademarks prevent a product from being copied or passed off as authentic by competitors. When Microsoft came up with a JavaScript implementation for Internet Explorer, it called the language JScript, which later ran a .NET version. Netscape worked with other companies, including Microsoft, to standardize the language using the Ecma International standards body, and ECMAScript was chosen as the neutral name, but Eich said, “ECMAScript has always been like a skin disease. It was an undesirable product name that I could hear.”
Oracle acquired the JavaScript trademark when it acquired Sun in 2010. In principle, this means that only Oracle can allow the language to be called JavaScript, but Dahl said: use. ”
Dahl claimed that Oracle “does not have a trademarked product,” but as a comment on Hacker News observes, the company does offer GraalVM, which includes a JavaScript implementation. That said, while Oracle does mention Java and MySQL, it doesn’t specifically mention JavaScript in its trademark guidelines. “Proper use of Oracle trademarks reinforces our branding role for our products and services and prevents them from becoming generic names for everyone to use,” the guidelines state. .
We asked Oracle for their take on Dahl’s request.
