Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

I expect that this was the predicted outcome? And that all we are seeing here is the beginning of the process, rather than the end?

On the face of it, JavaScript seems like a pretty solid trademark. But, to me, it’s really not clear how much control Oracle has asserted over it…

View on HN

(Not a lawyer.) To have rights to a trademark, you have to use it in, well, trade. It’s not enough for a term to refer to a specific thing in normal usage, you must have a widely recognized claim on that thing. It should be in the customer’s interest that your thing not be confusable with thing-alikes that others may offer, specifically by having an exclusive right to be sold as the thing. And Oracle demonstrably does not deal in “JavaScript” any more than many many other companies and individuals do.

(Also not a lawyer)

This is why I think Deno has a solid chance here. Sun may have filed for the trademark, but it’s not clear to me how much it has been used by Oracle. I also think this is why this step is likely the beginning of litigation, not the end. With Oracle not voluntarily withdrawing the trademark, it allows the rest of the process to invalidate the trademark to begin.

The only JavaScript offering from Oracle that I know of is GraalVM[0]. It's funny though - they use "JavaScript" and "ECMAScript" interchangeably in their docs. They call it "A high-performance embeddable JavaScript runtime for Java" but then tout it as "ECMAScript Compliant", basically acknowledging that JavaScript is defined by ECMAScript specs and the terms mean the same thing.

[0] https://www.graalvm.org/javascript/

(Not a lawyer, just a nerd observing terminology)

Them calling it ECMAScript in some instances means that it follows the actual ECMA spec for ECMAScript (what everyone calls JavaScript historically). Them calling it JavaScript implies it could be their flavor, or something like Node and not necessarily strictly ECMAScript, at least that'd be the reason I'd use it interchangeably.

not sure if this is why they do it, but trademark law requires you to have a generic name for your product. "Kleenex brand facial tissue"

not having and using a generic name creates the danger of people attaching your trademarked name as the generic and you might lose your trademark.

Not only that, but other company's not-technically-javascript products are widely known as JavaScript. And have been for close to 3 decades now (Microsoft's JScript was released in 1996)

Haha yeah, in my experience, they use less JavaScript than most tech companies out there.

Their image is very enterprisey, so Java, C... You don't think of JavaScript when you think of Oracle.

Oracle has a pretty strong claim on Java, and JavaScript was named after Java explicitly to piggy-back on the that names recognition and success.

It’s bit like saying McDonald’s shouldn’t have trademark claims on “McDonald’s carbonara” because they don’t deal in Italian cuisine (that much)

The relationship between those two things is more like the relationship between burgers and fries, two things that some people may think belong together, but having a claim on one surely has connection to having a claim on the other.

Or like saying McDonald's shouldn't have a trademark on "Big Mac" outside of beef burgers, because they don't regularly deal in "Big Macs" made out of chicken.

> On the face of it, JavaScript seems like a pretty solid trademark.

It seems to me that it's the exact opposite of that: It's been so thoroughly genericised that it might as well not exist as a trademark. Also, I couldn't even tell you of a single product Oracle sells that uses the mark.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com