[HN Gopher] JavaScript Trademark Update
___________________________________________________________________
JavaScript Trademark Update
Author : thebeardisred
Score : 854 points
Date : 2025-06-28 18:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (deno.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (deno.com)
| lvl155 wrote:
| 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.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Those days will probably never be behind us because incentive
| structures in companies make employees risk averse.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| When has Oracle ever added value whatsoever to the tech
| ecosystem?
| tombert wrote:
| I don't love Oracle, but GraalVM is pretty cool. That and the
| vanilla JVM keeps getting updates.
| ternaryoperator wrote:
| They've done a ton of stuff with Java, including open-
| sourcing it in its entirety.
| homebrewer wrote:
| 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
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 MariaDB, then named 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.
|
| SQL is kind of shitty, but the relational database model
| is so great that it makes up for it. And until the rise
| of entity component systems, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and
| MariaDB, all the decent implementations were proprietary
| software. Separately, although SQL's implementation of
| transactions is even more broken than its implementation
| of the relational model, transactional concurrency is
| also great enough to make up for SQL, and, again, all the
| usable implementations used to be proprietary.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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. [...]
| For several years after that, it was still the best
| database for some purposes.
|
| Which RDBMS software has/have become the best in the
| world after that?
| cerved wrote:
| Postgres presumably
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| As far as I am aware (I may be wrong, or things have
| changed in the last years) Postgres still is is worse in
| horizontal scaling than Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server
| (and likely also DB2).
| kragen wrote:
| Maybe, but I think MariaDB beats all of them at that.
|
| Also, though, horizontal scaling is a lot less important
| now than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
| https://www.servethehome.com/2025-server-starting-point-
| inte... says AMD has 192 cores per socket, and you can
| get two-socket motherboards, so 384 cores total. And you
| can stick 12 128GiB DDR5-6000 DIMMs in it, so 1.5
| tebibytes of RAM, and a single SSD is 30 terabytes, and
| SSDs can commit a transaction group durably in typically
| 0.1 milliseconds. And those 384 cores (EPYC 9005, so Zen
| 5c, https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-9005-turin-
| turns-trans...) are 2.25GHz and typically about 2.2
| instructions per clock
| (https://chipsandcheese.com/p/zen-5-variants-and-more-
| clock-f...), and they support AVX512.
|
| As one rough estimate, 2.25GHz with AVX512 (at 1 IPC)
| means you can do 36 billion column-oriented 32-bit
| integer operations per core per second, which with 384
| cores means 13 _trillion_ 32-bit integer operations per
| core per second. _On one server_. So if you have a query
| that needs to do a linear scan of a column in a
| 13-million-row table, the query might take 300ms, but you
| should be able to do a million such queries per second.
| But normally you index your tables so that most queries
| don 't need to do such inefficient things, so you should
| be able to handle many more queries per second than that!
|
| (Each socket has 12 DDR5 channels, totaling 576 gigabytes
| per second to DRAM per socket or 1.13 terabytes per
| second across the two of them, so you'll get worse
| performance if you're out of cache. And apparently you
| can use 512GiB DIMMs and get 6 tebibytes of RAM!)
|
| So, if you need more than one server for your database,
| it's probably because it's tens or hundreds of terabytes,
| or because you're handling tens of millions of queries
| per second, or because your database software is designed
| for spinning rust. Spinning rust is still the best way to
| store large databases, but now the cutoff for "large" is
| approaching the petabyte scale.
|
| I think the space of databases that are under ten
| terabytes and under ten million queries per second is
| large enough to cover almost everything that most people
| think of when they think of "databases".
| mr_toad wrote:
| > So, if you need more than one server for your database
|
| Servers fail, any serious business obviously needs more
| than one server. And many need more than one data centre,
| just for redundancy. The more modern Oracle clusters act
| in a similar manner to RAID arrays, with virtual
| databases replicated across clusters of physical servers
| in such a way that a loss of a physical server doesn't
| impact the virtual databases at all.
| kragen wrote:
| Most databases aren't running a business. It isn't 01973
| anymore. My web browser on my phone has a bunch of SQL
| databases.
|
| I was talking about horizontal scalability, not failover.
| You don't need horizontal scalability, or for that matter
| any special software features, for failover. (Though PITR
| is nice, especially if your database _is_ running a
| business.) With cloud computing vendors, you may not even
| need a second server to fail over to; you can bring it up
| when the failure happens and pay for it by the hour.
|
| The features you're talking about made a lot of sense 30
| years ago, maybe even 20 years ago. They still make a lot
| of sense if you need to handle hundreds of millions of
| queries per second or if you have hundreds of terabytes
| of data. But, for everything else, you can get by with
| vertical scaling, which is a lot less work. Unlike
| backups or rearchitecting your database, it's literally a
| product you can just buy.
|
| (A lot of the open-source relational databases I listed
| also support clustering for both HA and scalability; I
| just think those features are a lot less important when
| you can buy an off-the-shelf server with tebibytes of
| RAM.)
| mr_toad wrote:
| > But, for everything else, you can get by with vertical
| scaling
|
| I'm not arguing with that, I'm just pointing out why very
| large organisations still use Oracle.
| cgh wrote:
| This is a fantastic comment, thank you.
| kragen wrote:
| I don't know. Oracle was written to run on a VAXCluster
| with a shared disk with a seek time in the tens of
| milliseconds, and things like Postgres are kind of
| architected for that world. The world has changed a lot.
| Anything you could fit on disk in 02000 fits in RAM
| today, most of our programmable computing power is in
| GPUs instead of CPUs, website workloads are insanely
| read-heavy (favoring materialized views and readslave
| farms), SSDs can commit transactions durably in 0.1ms and
| support random reads while imposing heavy penalties on
| nonsequential writes, and spinning up ten thousand AWS
| Lambda functions to process a query in parallel is now a
| reasonable thing to do.
|
| I think you could make reasonable arguments for SQLite,
| Postgres, MariaDB, Impala, Hive, HSQLDB, SPARK, Drill, or
| even Numpy, TensorFlow, or Unity's ECS, though those last
| few lack the "internal representation independence"
| ("data independence") so central to Codd's conception.
|
| What's your opinion?
| pjmlp wrote:
| MS SQL Server, but certainly not an opinion shared among
| many HNers.
| mr_toad wrote:
| If you want high availability and scalability (and damn
| the expense), then Oracle is probably still number one.
| Especially for write heavy workloads. But not everyone
| can afford to burn money.
| Narciss wrote:
| This may be a setup but I gotta ask...why the preceding 0
| in 01979 and 02000?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Avoiding the y10k bug, obviously.
| thimabi wrote:
| Just delaying the y100k bug, I'd say
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Without knowing your parent: it's a cultural signifier of
| the Long Now Foundation.
| arp242 wrote:
| 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.
| cerved wrote:
| LMS/GLAS
| bch wrote:
| Made this mistake w VirtualBox once - never again. I
| ended up somehow running the proprietary version which
| "phoned home" and some 30 or 60 days later corporate got
| a call. When it comes to Oracle, I take Nancy Reagan's
| advice [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Say_No
| ksec wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| > MySQL 8 (released in 2018)
|
| Many already moved to MariaDB, because development stalled
| after Oracle bought Sun (which bought MySQL).
| tomnipotent wrote:
| MariaDB has seen decent adoption, but it's still an order
| of magnitude less than MySQL.
| thayne wrote:
| I think that postgresql's popularity has also benefited
| quite a bit from Oracle's acquisition of MySQL
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I wonder how much of that was due to cursed distro
| repositories.
|
| I will probably never forget the rage I felt at
| discovering the reason my scripts broke between Debian
| versions was because "apt-get install mysql" started
| silently installing MariaDB instead, which was close but
| subtly different enough. (I am honestly surprised
| considering an Oracle trademark is involved, no lawsuits
| were filed over this.)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Regarding Java, also to note that alongside IBM, they were
| cooperating with Sun since the very early days from Java,
| including the Network Computer efforts, for Java based thin
| clients.
| phartenfeller wrote:
| I think you underestimate the impact of their database on the
| world. They were a huge tech innovator in that part (and
| actually still are).
| Someone1234 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| oracle does engineering just fine, and they are actually
| still around...so maybe Sun was doing it wrong
| hamburglar wrote:
| 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.
| kyralis wrote:
| That sort of loaned manpower _isn 't_ free, despite
| management's continued delusions that it is. Loaners have
| a cost, both up-front (onboarding, mentoring, reviews,
| etc) and on-going (lack of organic expertise in the new
| code remaining on the team, maintenance of suboptimal or
| inconsistent code, etc). But they're not the sorts of
| costs that show up well on balance sheets, so good luck
| convincing anyone that they exist.
| zbentley wrote:
| 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.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| only if there is a 1-1 correspondence between engineering
| acumen and money-making acumen, which I'm sure you
| already know isn't the case.
| quest88 wrote:
| Who is responsible for the java API updates?
| raverbashing wrote:
| But did Sun actually add anything in relation to JavaScript?
| mosdl wrote:
| The name, it was originally going to be called Livescript.
| reddalo wrote:
| Damn I miss Sun Microsystems products.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And not a single company bothered to acquire Sun, after
| Gooogle torpedo it with Android (aka Google's J++ and .NET).
|
| Had it not been for Oracle, Java would have died on version
| 6, and it remains to be seen what would have happened from
| anything else.
| jennyholzer wrote:
| Everyone uses "JavaScript" to describe a language.
|
| Oracle is a parasite.
| nailer wrote:
| If Oracle win we rename the language JS. JS stands for nothing.
| throwawayoldie wrote:
| How about OS, where the "S" now stands for "sucks", and the
| meaning of the "O" is left as an exercise for the reader.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| This will cause confusion with OS for "Open Source".
| throwawayoldie wrote:
| Also "Operating System". This is a feature, not a bug.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| No, we rename Javascript to Typelessscript.
| pavlov wrote:
| Typescript--
| magicalhippo wrote:
| .Net compiles to it's IL and who writes raw JavaScript
| these days anyway, so just call it JSIL.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| We can just start calling it by its full Christian name,
| Eczemascript
| jm4 wrote:
| How about douche-named-Larry-script. Take a page out of
| Apple's playbook when they used the code name Butthead
| Astronomer.
|
| https://www.engadget.com/2014-02-26-when-carl-sagan-sued-
| app...
| zakki wrote:
| I guees we can use a name from island near Java. BaliScript,
| MaduraScript, KarimunScript and so on.
| Timwi wrote:
| Or JoeScript, substituting one slang term for "coffee" for
| another.
|
| TypeScript is now called DecafScript.
| drooopy wrote:
| DFCOCScript. "Dee-ef-coc-script" Damn fine cup of coffee
| Script
|
| Rolls off the tongue
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Aren't there laws about this? Where "Kleenex" becomes so
| universally }}]%^* )!;&
| 90s_dev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| The benefits are so easily taken for granted as just
| being normal parts of life.
|
| Just like how we take for granted that you can count on
| your food label not lying to you and your food not having
| dangerous ingredients, with proper inspections and such.
| Timwi wrote:
| But it stops you from getting an equivalent coke from any
| other vendor, even if you might want to (because it might
| be cheaper). You're assuming that everyone finds it as
| important as you do that your "Coke" comes from a
| specific manufacturer regardless of what the product
| actually is or contains.
|
| For Coke you might be right about most people (though not
| me) but there are plenty of products where brand loyalty
| isn't a thing. People just want some decent hand tissues
| around, nobody cares if it's made by actual Kleenex.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If I want to, I can readily buy a cola from several other
| companies _today_ , with trademark law as-is. I can get a
| Coke from only one.
|
| Are you arguing that I'd be somehow better off if any
| company could sell me an "equivalent" Coke, Toyota Camry,
| or iPhone?
| sfink wrote:
| That's an ironic example, because I've been to several
| areas where Coke _is_ the generic term and people would
| be confused if you said soda or soft drink or whatever. I
| have literally asked for a Coke and been asked "what
| kind?", with a gesture to a menu listing Sprite etc.
| (They were not asking about Diet Coca Cola.)
| WD-42 wrote:
| Pretty sure that's what the whole suit is about.
| tialaramex wrote:
| 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.
| make3 wrote:
| Is there a relative component to the evaluation of
| genericisation? eg., if only truck drivers know about the
| term Waterluvian, but the vast majority use it in the
| generic way, then it's generic? Because it would be a
| relevant update to that law, & apply here
| tialaramex wrote:
| Because there's not actual written legislation, you could
| try to make this argument in court, but, previously
| courts have stuck to the idea that they mean _everybody_
| so truck drivers wouldn 't be enough. Maybe "Everybody in
| New York" cuts it in a New York court, certainly I'd
| expect that "Nigerians don't know this word" wouldn't
| count against you in any court in the United States of
| America - but the sort of relativity you're thinking of
| was definitely not on their mind.
| its-summertime wrote:
| The amount of people that use JavaScript to refer to the
| Oracle-provided JavaScript is zero, the amount of people
| who can refer to the Oracle-provided JavaScript over the
| last 10+ years is zero. Because it isn't a thing. I'm
| pretty sure that is against trade mark regulations.
| Fogest wrote:
| 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.
| josefx wrote:
| JavaScript was created as a wrapper for Java Applets. Oracle
| optained both when it bought Sun. The official name of the
| language is ECMA Script, but people insist on calling it the
| trademarked name because ECMA makes people think of an
| unpleasent skin condition.
| bobajeff wrote:
| This is one of the things that makes me believe that humanity has
| just about run it's course.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Everyone uses "JavaScript" to describe a language--not a brand.
|
| 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...
| nailer wrote:
| No. I was around then and nobody thought of JS as a Sun
| product.
| sockmeistr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Rename it GoScript this time around.
| mosdl wrote:
| It was livescript originally.
| scosman wrote:
| Java is a Sun product, but Java has nothing to do with
| Javascript except a confusing name overlap.
|
| Javascript was written at Netscape.
| ndiddy wrote:
| The JavaScript name came out of a cross-licensing deal
| between Netscape and Sun where Netscape would bundle a copy
| of the JVM with their browser. Sun needed a way to put the
| JVM on most Windows users' computers to get developers to
| write Java software instead of Windows software, and they
| knew Microsoft wouldn't ship a product that would threaten
| the Windows platform's domination, so they figured that
| bundling with Netscape was their next best option. If you
| read the initial JavaScript press release ( https://www.tech-
| insider.org/java/research/1995/1204.html ), it's mainly
| marketed as a way to write glue code to make it possible for
| Java applets (where the real application logic would go) to
| interact with an HTML page:
|
| > With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent
| form that performs loan payment or currency exchange
| calculations right on the client in response to user input. A
| multimedia weather forecast applet written in Java can be
| scripted by JavaScript to display appropriate images and
| sounds based on the current weather readings in a region. A
| server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a
| relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. A page
| might contain JavaScript scripts that run on both the client
| and the server. On the server, the scripts might dynamically
| compose and format HTML content based on user preferences
| stored in a relational database, and on the client, the
| scripts would glue together an assortment of Java applets and
| HTML form elements into a live interactive user interface for
| specifying a net-wide search for information.
|
| > Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on
| both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to
| modify the properties and behavior of Java objects, so the
| range of live online applications that dynamically present
| information to and interact with users over enterprise
| networks or the Internet is virtually unlimited. Netscape
| will support Java and JavaScript in client and server
| products as well as programming tools and applications to
| make this vision a reality.
|
| > "Programmers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about
| Java because it was designed from the ground up for the
| Internet. JavaScript is a natural fit, since it's also
| designed for the Internet and Unicode-based worldwide use,"
| said Bill Joy, co-founder and vice president of research at
| Sun. "JavaScript will be the most effective method to connect
| HTML-based content to Java applets."
|
| This was all implemented, and Java applets had full
| interoperability with JavaScript. Applets could call
| JavaScript functions, and JavaScript functions could call
| applet methods. Of course over time people gave up on Java
| applets and JavaScript became a good enough language to write
| real application logic directly in it. It's true that
| JavaScript now has virtually nothing to do with Java, but
| that wasn't the case initially, and the name has at least
| some logic behind it.
| scosman wrote:
| Ah, great background.
|
| One more tidbit I just learned: there was a Netscape/Sun
| deal around the name, so the registered trademark has some
| legal history. It's not that Sun (and then Oracle) just
| claimed rights to something Netscape made.
| adolph wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| throwawayoldie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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."
|
| https://2024.stateofjs.com/en-US/usage/
| throwawayoldie wrote:
| Nice to hear, thanks.
| jenadine wrote:
| Btw, The language is called ECMAScript
| echelon wrote:
| Does everyone else pronounce that as "eczema script", too?
| wiseowise wrote:
| "EnemaScript"
| echelon wrote:
| I mean, I don't think of it as a rebuke of JavaScript.
| I've just found it to be the most natural pronunciation
| for that sequence of letters. I really can't read it any
| other way.
| ajkjk wrote:
| no it's not, that's a bureaucratic hoop-jump
| mmastrac wrote:
| Literally nobody, outside of formal documents and perhaps
| pedants, uses that catastrophe of a name.
| runarberg wrote:
| 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.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| It is already called ECMAScript; they do not need to change
| it. It is also called JavaScript. (I don't know if there is
| trademark issues with ECMA too though)
|
| However, the name "JavaScript" (and "ECMAScript") is in use
| enough anyways (like is described in the article), so
| Oracle shouldn't properly restrict others to use it in this
| way.
| alberth wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| ray023 wrote:
| "Don't knowledge it" because he did not put a stupid TM sign in
| every blog posts he writes mentioning Node.js is a stretch.
| alberth wrote:
| There's no acknowledgment of Node.js trademark on Deno.com
| ... and the landing page is largely about how much better
| Deno is over Node.js.
|
| Of all places to put trademark acknowledgement, it'd be there
| - and it's missing.
|
| https://deno.com/
| nosefurhairdo wrote:
| 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?
| fredfish wrote:
| AFAIK Sun gave Netscape free use of the JavaScript Trademark
| purely to side with Netscape against Microsoft in the browser
| wars, language wars, etc. I would think there is still
| something related to the original agreement.
|
| It looks like JScript is still trademarked by Microsoft, why
| not ask them to do whatever the community thinks is right for
| ECMAScript names and then we can all refer to the language a
| little faster?
| Someone1234 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Trademark is not copyright.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Related: https://javascript.tm/
| bangaladore wrote:
| Hugged to death on my end
| flkenosad wrote:
| Node is about to become irrelevant. As soon as Microsoft ships
| TypeScript 7.
| rockwotj wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Are you conflating node and javascript?
| cakoose wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How does a 10x faster TS to JS compiler make a JS runtime
| irrelevant?
| roman_soldier wrote:
| 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.
| lerp-io wrote:
| bun is not faster than node, why do people keep thinking this
| lmao. v8 runtime is like x4 more performant than spidermonkey
| which is what bun uses.
| sgammon wrote:
| Bun uses JSC from Apple, not Spidermonkey.
| wiseowise wrote:
| You made a fool of yourself.
| mbStavola wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]:
| https://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pno=92086835&pty=CAN&eno...
|
| [1]:
| https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn75026640&docI...
| thayne wrote:
| IANAL, but I don't think your analysis is quite correct.
|
| I think the key is
|
| > 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
|
| If I understand correctly (and I very well might not), that
| means that it doesn't matter whether some of the provided
| specimens were fraudulent or not, in order to revoke the
| trademark the burden of proof is to show the _entire_ trademark
| claim was fraudulent, and if there was no fraud, then the
| trademark wouldn 't have been granted.
|
| Deno might be able to make a stronger argument of fraud, if
| they could show without that specimen USPTO would have rejected
| the application, or that the other specimen was also invalid,
| but that would delay the proceedings and require more work for
| them.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| Interesting point, but I'm not able to judge the trutfulness.
|
| So the JVM has a runtime-enforced nominal type system (and
| object model) with classes.
|
| But JS, to my knowledge, only has primitive types enforced at
| runtime, and no nomimal class system, unless you basically
| implement it yourself?
|
| Uh, edit: maybe I get you now, it does have that in a way.
| But prototype identity and "instanceof" are rarely used in
| practise.
|
| Maybe I'm missing your point here. Answering at late local
| time.
|
| It would be so great to have a nominal type system in the
| browser though.
|
| So many JS librarlies have their own version of it, and it
| causes insufferable headaches when combined with TypeScript.
|
| Like, they use complicated hacks to make sure that their
| library objects are not structurall/duck typed.
| twoodfin wrote:
| classes != objects
|
| Yes, the typing and semantic models are wildly different.
| The point is that they're primitive in a way that the other
| widespread alternative, C++, did not inherit from its
| Cfront heritage.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| > classes != objects
|
| that's what I was aiming at, maybe poorly.
|
| There's tons of libraries that use some kind of runtime-
| observable instance property as a tag, to mimic nominal
| typing in JS.
|
| The same thing is also possible using prototype identity,
| if you either use the class keyword syntax sugar
| introduced with ES5 (?), or if you manually do OOP using
| prototypes. But the latter is very uncommon.
|
| It seems to be more common to add a property like
| $_$_$____superlib__$-inst_WALRUS
|
| and use that as a tag.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Well, the models were in so far compatible as that JavaScript
| could access them to some degree from applets. Which is why
| they picked the name ...
| devjab wrote:
| > Which is why they picked the name ...
|
| Is that really true though? As I understood it JavaScript
| was mainly adopted because Java was popular at the time.
| JavaScript originally shipped as LiveScript, and they
| changed it to JavaScript later. Here is a nice quote on it
| from Brendan Eich:
|
| "The name JavaScript was chosen when Java was hot, and we
| were doing LiveConnect to hook up JS to Java applets."
|
| Here is one from David Flanagan:
|
| "JavaScript was originally developed under the name
| Mocha... It was renamed JavaScript in a co-marketing deal
| between Netscape and Sun Microsystems."
| rvnx wrote:
| We can also punish people who are historically connected
| to this trademark and supporting Oracle. Like in this
| case, Mozilla and Brave.
|
| If they have less users due to Oracle, they will put
| pressure on Oracle to release the trademark.
| moralestapia wrote:
| 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.
| mmastrac wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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).
|
| 1: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75026640&caseSearchType
| =U...
|
| 2: https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-
| database/2...
| vips7L wrote:
| Oracle develops, maintains, and sells 2 different
| JavaScript runtimes. They're definitely using it.
| thayne wrote:
| So do many other entities.
|
| Oracle does not control the specification of the language
| (ECMA does), nor does it own rights to the original
| implementation (I believe Mozilla does).
| vips7L wrote:
| I don't think that matters in the context of the
| JavaScript trademark. Within the context of the trademark
| Oracle does have business developing and selling
| JavaScript.
| pgh wrote:
| Yep, and it now features as a supported language in their
| latest database version. That might be another reason
| they continue to protect the trademark.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| That 2nd example is a pretty bad example of JavaScript
| being used as a Oracle trademark.
|
| Id argue the opposite. The wording makes no reference to
| oracles ownership of the product or name that is
| JavaScript. And ECMA is reffered to as the "maker" of the
| standard.
|
| If anything, this is an example by Oracle themselves using
| the trademark in a generic context.
|
| Its like cocacola calling themselves "a producer of fanta"
| and referring to a the food and drug administration to
| define what that means.
|
| I doubt the writer of that doc was aware that Oracle owns
| the JavaScript trademark.
| artursapek wrote:
| wow, they filed for it in 1995? that's wayyy before Node.Js
| or Dahl came on the scene. Or before the language even
| mattered that much.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Even though one may not like it, the trademark fairly
| belongs to Oracle.
| zettabomb wrote:
| Again, that's the point of the suit. It likely does not.
| nkrisc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Wouldn't the generic term be ECMAscript? I realize that that is
| a stupid name that no one wants to use.
| maxk42 wrote:
| 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.
| relativeadv wrote:
| Oracle is doing something petty and absurd? Are you sure?
| kstrauser wrote:
| The hell, you say!
| Quekid5 wrote:
| "To shreds, you say?"
| drdaeman wrote:
| 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.
| vips7L wrote:
| It's a huge company with different divisions.
|
| Oracle is one of the leading researchers in JIT compilers,
| garbage collectors, and language interpreters.
| bigiain wrote:
| Part of me thinks that's just the Oracle equivalent of
| janitorial and catering staff, the people you need to keep
| around to ensure the people creating the company profit,
| the sales people and lawyers, can work most efficiently.
| vips7L wrote:
| I honestly don't see how those equate.
| geodel wrote:
| Yeah unlike other companies who keep technical staff on
| rolls to wash their feet and drink that water. Because
| profiting from technical work is unthinkable in industry.
| coldpie wrote:
| I would never hire someone with Oracle on their resume. The
| complete lack of morals it takes to work there is
| immediately disqualifying.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Harsh, but understandable. I'd make an exception for
| first job out of school people. They might not know
| better yet. If someone worked for an Oracle customer
| before going to work for Larry, though, I'd be convinced
| they were the devil incarnate.
| vips7L wrote:
| I think it's kind of sad that you would have that
| opinion. Are the engineers working on OpenJdk completely
| lacking of morals?
|
| How does working for Oracle compare to say working at
| Facebook or Google with all their privacy invasion tech?
| freedomben wrote:
| I despise Oracle, and I think there aren't many companies
| out there as evil as them. I would be thrilled if they
| burned to the ground, figuratively speaking of course.
|
| But that said, I think it would be dumb to jump to
| conclusions just based on having Oracle on the resume.
| You should at least ask them why they worked there, and
| why they left. For all you know, they had no idea how bad
| Oracle was when they started, and they left because they
| saw how evil they were. That is the exact kind of person
| that I do want to hire
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Back when Oracle acquired Sun they told us "Sun had more
| lawyers per capita than we"
|
| Interpretation on the fact and metric and the need to tell I
| leave up to you
| WD-42 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| These are all the result of the principal agent problem
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/principal-agent-
| problem...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Not all employees are willing to rock the boat, ask
| around and risk exposing themselves as superfluous. It's
| less risky to always act like - or tell yourself - that
| every task that ends up on your desk require throughout
| diligence.
|
| I think this is _especially_ true at big corps with
| little actually meaningful work and where most people who
| actually care about doing meaningful work has left a long
| time ago.
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| Goodwill isn't "nothing", but good luck explaining that to a
| lawyer.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It's not even justify their salary. A lawyer's sole job is to
| advocate for the legal position of their client as zealously
| as possible. A really good chief counsel would go to the CEO
| and weigh up the merits of the marketing win of "losing" this
| case. A drone lawyer just files whatever is necessary (or
| even unnecessary) to fight the case even when it makes zero
| god damn sense. e.g. giving a person a 25 year prison
| sentence for stealing a slice of pizza.
| thayne wrote:
| > Also why would they give up something for nothing.
|
| Because it provides zero value and costs something to keep.
| timewizard wrote:
| They hired outside counsel to represent them in this matter.
| NBJack wrote:
| 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 team
| simply responded "it's standing policy".
| theturtle32 wrote:
| "soul"? Oracle never had one in the first place.
| arp242 wrote:
| Lawnmowers are incapable of caring about goodwill.
| Findecanor wrote:
| Quoting Bryan Cantrill?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2302s
| ryandrake wrote:
| Everyone who passionately defends a big company's honor
| online needs to watch and understand that bit! Companies
| are not humans with feelings and empathy. They're all
| lawnmowers. That they happen to be made of people doesn't
| change their nature.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I'm not here to troll on Bryan nor Oxide, but wouldn't
| your same "rule" apply to Oxide?
| globular-toast wrote:
| Worth starting at 34:05 if you haven't seen it before.
| homebrewer wrote:
| 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.
| ksec wrote:
| >by simply updating CDDL
|
| How about a simpler solution, just relicense everything to
| BSD / MIT.
| ndiddy wrote:
| 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.
| baobun wrote:
| Not so fast.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44409160
| ndiddy wrote:
| Aww :(
| saghm wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's not any more difficult either. They would both
| require getting all past contributors to agree.
|
| I think some projects _have_ done that in the past, but
| probably none where a big company owns the copyright to
| most of the code.
| muglug wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Nevermark wrote:
| My guess, is that the people who could break protocol are
| too busy to deal with a request to break protocol. Too
| busy to give it a thought.
|
| And anyone who is sympathetic to the request, knows that
| campaigning for the protocol break would require
| disrupting two or three levels of management above them,
| forcing powerful people to deal with something they don't
| care about. And that would be interpreted as wasting
| important people's time.
|
| So the organization, as a decision making entity, is
| incapable of recognizing, much less considering, requests
| for an exception to default behavior.
|
| I worked with a business that operated this way for many
| years. Even when there were overwhelming reasons to break
| process, the spark and tinder never got anywhere near
| each other.
|
| Everyone between the spark and tinder empathized, talked
| to "somebody" to demonstrate they "tried", and to create
| an alibi for the inevitable "no" response that came next,
| while quietly doing everything they could to smother that
| spark, before it burned them.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Thank for describing so eloquently this phenomenon, which
| IMHO is the root cause of the dysfunction endemic to big
| companies.
| make3 wrote:
| Satya's attempt to rehumanize Microsoft by making efforts
| to help open source projects really helped Microsoft's
| image
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Yeah, but Microsoft also did a two steps forward and
| three steps back there. Things like shoving product ads
| onto the lock screen and preinstalling Candy Crush Soda
| Saga cost them more goodwill than any developer-facing
| effort earned them.
| xenator wrote:
| This one especially hurt only people who are inside
| Windows ecosystem. For people like me Microsoft is nice
| author of one product. I'm talking about VS Code.
| 0x073 wrote:
| And its underlying monaco editor.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Microsoft's "core DNA" is still there firmly, though.
|
| They successfully weaponized open source by giving
| something for free and clawing back step by step (i.e.
| closing open source VSCode plugins), and leaving parts
| which does drowns competitors most effectively open.
|
| Also they act like their open source code is "Free". They
| firmly control it, yet act like they don't.
|
| Microsoft's image didn't improve a bit in my eyes.
| Expurple wrote:
| > Also they act like their open source code is "Free".
| They firmly control it, yet act like they don't.
|
| They are responsive to the community and merge community
| PRs. That's already more "open" than, say, SQLite.
|
| Sure, they don't give away merge rights and keep
| exclusive control over the upstream copy. But how many
| "open" projects have a second maintainer at all? I mean,
| more than _one person_ (the original author) with merge
| access.
|
| The code is free. You can always fork it and use it
| however you like. That's always been the deal you get
| with open source.
|
| Sure, it's nice when the upstream maintainers always do
| only the things you like, and you never need to fork. But
| that's a separate quality, unrelated to the code itself
| being "free" or "open".
| znpy wrote:
| > They successfully weaponized open source by giving
| something for free and clawing back step by step (i.e.
| closing open source VSCode plugins), and leaving parts
| which does drowns competitors most effectively open.
|
| And that's why people should be pushing for Free
| Software, rather than Open Source.
|
| 20 years in the game, and I ended up agreeing with steve
| ballmer: open source is cancer.
|
| Look at how bad it went for ElasticSearch and Redis, and
| then look how well it's going for Grafana (whose software
| is Free Software - besides being just great).
|
| This is so true that Redis did not go back to being "open
| source", it became Free Software (AGPL).
| Aeolun wrote:
| I'm fairly certain the people buying Oracle stock ar
| elopking for exactly the kind of company it actually is.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Their stock is 50% higher than it was a year ago.
|
| Tesla stock is 63% higher than it was a year ago, does this
| prove that each and every decision their leadership made
| was helpful to the bottom line?
| danparsonson wrote:
| It demonstrates that things that should matter, don't
| always.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| Since Oracle is not in B2C, there is no brand damage in
| openly being a net-negative rent-seeker. Rent-seeking is
| what shareholders crave. It makes line go up, it has
| electrolytes.
| thayne wrote:
| It only makes the line go up in the short term. In the
| long term companies will avoid Oracle, and sales will go
| down. But shareholders don't care about the longterm.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| Maybe they'll invest some of the rent into monopoly
| strategies and micro-improvements that keep Oracle
| attractive for high-stakes customers.
|
| I hope I'm wrong though.
| adventured wrote:
| Oracle has demonstrated the long-term and their stock has
| never been higher. Their sales are finally heading higher
| again.. They're one of the oldest software companies and
| are approaching 50 years old. What is more long-term in
| their industry than what they have accomplished?
|
| They're better positioned now than they have been at any
| other point in the past 10-15 years.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| To be fair, maybe they do make good enterprise database
| software. There's got to be something to their success
| apart from lock-in.
| tux3 wrote:
| Just make sure you don't benchmark it. Comparing to the
| competition is a serious breach of contract.
|
| Oracle is not an abusive relationship, it's just that you
| shouldn't be looking elsewhere, and infractions will be
| punished. They are very serious about audits.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| That sounds absolutely ridiculous, but well, you made me
| search it, and it seems to be true-ish :D
|
| So here is the shortcut to a HN thread about this, for
| people like me, who hadn't heard about the case (assuming
| that's the one you meant):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886333
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| However, it is not legal to then redistribute this
| combination. Which essentially means linux distros cannot
| ship with OpenZFS: each user must combine the two on their
| own.
|
| (This doesn't necessarily stop people, but it is read by
| Debian as "illegal enough" to warrant a splash screen on
| installing OpenZFS that you're losing the right to
| redistribute.)
| curt15 wrote:
| ZFS is widely used with Linux in HPC
| (https://computing.llnl.gov/projects/openzfs). Is asking
| users to install ZFS separately really that much of a
| lift for ZFS's target audience?
| remexre wrote:
| Being out-of-tree means that kernel refactors break ZFS,
| and that it has a lot fewer hands and eyeballs available
| for the kinds of bugs that require internal design
| changes to fix (rather than paper over).
| josefx wrote:
| Most people don't blindly run the latest kernel. I don't
| think I ever ran into issues with out of kernel modules
| on a stable distro.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Asking for seperate install of a filesystem is a big
| deal. It severely limits how the filesystem can be used.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Who would sue, and what damages would they demonstrate in
| this case? Both the Linux and ZFS source is available and
| you are allowed and encouraged to build and use them.
| Redistributing binaries can be thought of caching
| precompiled artifacts, merely speeding up what you can
| already do manually (and with reproductible builds the
| result should be identical). Nobody loses anything.
|
| Let's say I built a magical compiler capable of compiling
| a Linux+ZFS kernel in miliseconds. I put it behind a web
| UI which accepts a Linux tarball and ZFS tarball and
| spits out the compiled kernel. Because of some mysterious
| bug I am still trying to solve, only specific Linux and
| ZFS tarballs work, so I put validation to hash the
| uploaded tarballs and only let through the ones that are
| known to work.
|
| Let's peel back the curtain: there is no magical compiler
| and all this is doing is hashing the input kernel & ZFS
| source tarballs, using it as a lookup table in a cache of
| precompiled binaries, and spitting out the matching one,
| which is currently not allowed. But let's assume the
| compiler _was_ real, in this case it should be fine, even
| though the functionality of the system is no different.
|
| I would at least understand if one of the licenses
| explicitly restricted the right to distribute ready-to-
| use binaries as a way to carve themselves a moat so the
| authors are the only ones that would be able to do it
| (and thus charge for it). But that's not the case here,
| nobody is better (or worse) off whether I waste time
| building it manually vs reuse someone else's earlier
| effort of building it.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| It would be the Free Software Foundation, for a copyright
| violation due to GPL licensing violation. (Technically
| the Linux Kernel Foundation, as they're the copyright
| holders here, but the FSF is generally involved in suits
| to protect GPL.) It is not necessary to demonstrate
| damages for copyright infringement; there are statutory
| (assumed) damages for this tort.
|
| WOULD they? It depends on how important it is to have a
| credible threat of enforcement for GPL violations. But
| it's not zero, and it's a pretty clear violation. Which
| is enough to scare off most major distros - if they
| receive a C&D, that'd be a breaking change they'd have to
| push retroactively. Not worth the risk.
| cxr wrote:
| Ignoring how Sun/Oracle's shenanigans with ZFS don't nearly
| account for "90% of their brand damage"...
|
| > simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL
|
| That can't be done at this point. Owing to a decision that
| arose right here from a discussion on HN, the ZFS maintainers
| adopted a policy in 2016 to opt out of the CDDL's built-in
| "any subsequent version" clause for new source files:
| ~/scratch/zfs$ grep --exclude-dir=.git -Ire "Common
| Development and Distribution License" -A 2 | grep -ie
| "\(Version 1\.0 only\|\<only\>.*\<version\>\)" | wc -l
| 821
|
| (The CDDL is a file-based license. At the time of that
| decision, there were already roughly a hundred CDDL-licensed
| files in the source tree specified as available under
| "Version 1.0 only".)
| NegativeK wrote:
| Why would they do that instead of the status quo, which is a
| gift for their lawyers to open later?
|
| I don't associate Oracle and good will, and I don't think
| they care.
| hobs wrote:
| No, they could not. Anything Oracle does at this point will
| never undo the damage their brand has, or else you are a
| fool.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Oracle's official position is that CDDL is GPL compatible and
| no changes are needed.
| kstrauser wrote:
| When they've testified to that in a courtroom and we have
| established legal precedence, then, and only then, would I
| remotely consider it the case.
| justinator wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mcv wrote:
| Because Microsoft was trying to takeover and change Java, and
| Sun actually made Java. How is that in any way the same
| situation as this?
| flomo wrote:
| Specifically, this is why Internet Explorer had "JScript".
| Microsoft did bad things to Java and lost their trademark
| license.
| randyrand wrote:
| 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.
| burnte wrote:
| 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.
| N7lo4nl34akaoSN wrote:
| They profit through conflation with Java.
| xyst wrote:
| Oracle and "goodwill" in the same sentence is laughable.
| greggsy wrote:
| This is the wrong way to look at it from a business
| perspective. They don't directly profit off licensing or
| support or anything like that, but they gain free advertising.
|
| They gain absolutely nothing by handing over the name and brand
| - in fact they lose valuable brand recognition.
|
| Obviously most people in the industry hate them with a passion
| (see this thread as evidence), but many see the association as
| evidence that they might at least have some expertise with that
| product set. I certainly don't agree with their position, but
| it makes sense commercially.
| msinclair wrote:
| How are they going to lose brand recognition, when a majority
| of people do not associate JavaScript with Oracle? The only
| language I associate with Oracle is Java.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Brand recognition for _what_?
|
| _No one_ thinks of Oracle when they see JavaScript.
| danparsonson wrote:
| In fact for myself, today was the first day I knew Oracle
| have anything whatsoever to do with JavaScript.
| fourthark wrote:
| Oracle purchased Sun, which purchased Netscape. I had to
| look it up.
|
| Edit: more complete history
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44408760
| Zafira wrote:
| > Oracle, to my knowledge, does not profit at all off of the
| JavaScript name or brand.
|
| At this time, but their ownership and past behavior indicates
| that if Deno or anyone else tries to have a paid offering,
| there's a non-zero chance Oracle will come sniffing for low
| effort money.
| Quekid5 wrote:
| "Oracle" and goodwill is not a thing.
| breve wrote:
| > _They have an opportunity to create some goodwill here_
|
| According to Bryan Cantrill, you don't need to be open minded
| about Oracle. It's a waste of the openness of your mind. He
| says what you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it
| is. He believes there has been no entity in human history with
| less complexity and nuance to it than Oracle.
|
| Bryan warns, _" Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing
| 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' -- the lawnmower doesn't give a
| shit about you, the lawnmower can't hate you. Don't
| anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about
| Oracle."_
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=1981s
| heybales wrote:
| This is so true. And in my experience Oracle's main business
| seems to be getting companies to sign complicated contracts,
| waiting a year or two, and then suing them for some
| infraction so that they can extort another contract from
| them. I haven't met an Oracle product yet that can't be done
| better by either free software or a less litigious company.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| _Broadcom has entered the chat._
|
| It's wild that cease and desists and audit notices are
| becoming common ways to punish someone for just... not
| renewing your contract.
| pavlov wrote:
| Former Twitter has been suing its customers if they don't
| spend enough money on ads on the platform.
|
| Tech companies and oligarchs are incredibly entitled.
| zaphirplane wrote:
| This is hyperbole to the extreme. I have nothing what so
| ever to do with oracle
| xixixao wrote:
| We moved from mssql on Azure to Oracle. What should do
| instead, if Azure is a hard constraint?
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Postgres, for example, or MySQL.
| xixixao wrote:
| Our use cases are primarily analytical. We already use
| Postgres for other workloads.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Maybe DuckDB then?
| pjmlp wrote:
| The only good SQL tooling I am aware of, really good with
| compilers, debuggers, IDEs, is MS SQL Server.
|
| Then stuff like distributed transactions, raw disk access
| for databases, among other niceties that people reaching to
| Postgres or MySQL probably never heard of, but many Fortune
| 500 enjoy, even if one for checking bullet points on RFPs.
|
| Postgres comes second, after getting all puzzle pieces
| together, some of them also commercial.
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| I personally have come to the conclusion that behind every
| major open-source or free software success story, there is
| a completely dysfunctional market. Without this, it would
| be impossible to find enough people willing to say, "Fuck
| that shit, we're going to recode this ourselves."
|
| The fact that there are so many people motivated to code
| alternatives to Oracle products says a lot about Oracle's
| business practices.
| jjice wrote:
| There is nothing I take more glee in than listening to
| bcantrill talk negatively of Oracle. Whenever Oracle comes up
| in one of his talks or a podcast, I know I'm in for a treat.
| brundolf wrote:
| Hahahahaha
| rendaw wrote:
| GP is saying from a purely mechanical, non-human standpoint
| Oracle's actions don't make sense.
| Groxx wrote:
| Oracle defends their properties whether it makes sense or
| not. That is what the machine does.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| They do, if the lawnmower believes "more trademarks good"
| (and which corporation doesn't?), and trademarks must be
| actively used and defended to be kept.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Like all machines in the real world, the Oracle machine
| intelligence is limited - it can't process every single
| thing to infinite detail. "More trademarks good" and
| "trademarks must be actively used and defended to be
| kept" are heuristics and explain this well if you tack on
| an " _on average_ " to the former.
| josefx wrote:
| It doesn't "make sense" for a lawnmower to cut hands
| either, it isn't a meat grinder after all. However it is a
| blade attached to a motor and from a purely mechanical,
| non-human perspective it will cut whatever comes within
| reach.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Blood pathogen then?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35908391
| ludwigvan wrote:
| This is one of my all-time favorite talks! So good. Thank you
| Bryan Cantrill!
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Apparently not everybody got the Lawnmower Memo, so thanks
| for posting that again, as a reminder to people like sprash
| who think I should have "sincerely asked if you are allowed
| to publish the [NeWS source] code". As if sincerity would
| help, and as if I haven't been sincerely asking since 1986.
|
| I'll also sincerely ask: Does anybody at Oracle know how I
| can get in touch with their HR department to find out what
| ever happened to my Sun 401k plan? Because nobody will answer
| my calls, and it's a lot of money of mine plus 33 years of
| interest they owe me that they're holding on to, which they
| inherited from Sun and then disappeared from all known
| records (except for a record that says it once existed and
| Oracle has it, but no other info), and they won't pick up the
| phone or return my email, no matter how "sincerely" I ask or
| how long I wait on hold.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44370636
|
| sprash 4 days ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on:
| Ancient X11 scaling technology
|
| > 1994
|
| Apparently you have to be criticizing X11 for more than three
| decades now. Since you seem to know your stuff, could you
| please post a link to your git repository containing your
| personal display server that solves all the problems?
|
| DonHopkins 4 days ago | prev | next [-]
|
| Since they bought Sun Microsystems, Oracle now owns the
| rights to the NeWS source code, so unfortunately I'm not
| legally allowed to post the NeWS server source code on my
| Github page, although I spent many years unsuccessfully
| fighting to make NeWS free and evangelizing it to anyone who
| would listen, like RMS and my colleagues and customers at
| Sun:
|
| https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/rms.news.txt
|
| https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/news-ooo-
| review...
|
| https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/questionaire.tx.
| ..
|
| https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/grasshopper.msg.
| ..
|
| https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/sevans.txt
|
| https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/Explanation.txt
|
| [...]
|
| sprash 4 days ago | parent | next [-]
|
| > Oracle owns the rights to the NeWS source code so I'm not
| allowed to post it on my Github page.
|
| They are certainly not making any money with it right now.
| All patents should be expired by now. Have you ever sincerely
| asked if you are allowed to publish the code? [...]
|
| DonHopkins 4 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [-]
|
| [...] Ha ha! Good luck, kiddo. Have you ever tried asking a
| lawnmower for favors? Do you really think "sincerity" would
| help?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728
|
| https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s
|
| [...]
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| lawyers need something to do.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| There's plenty of useful to do. Too bad they don't get paid
| to do that.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Yeah, they could be suing an orphanage or enabling the
| development of strip-mines in virgin rainforest.
|
| Honestly, oracle is a pretty effective containment vessel
| for fine legal minds.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| I have a feeling that a lot of big corps somehow work as
| effective containment vessels for decent workforce this
| way. It feels like a conspiracy but it doesn't make sense
| as one to me.
| dad_chowder wrote:
| Almost like they're not very smart people!
| thayne wrote:
| The only logical reason I can think of to fight to keep the
| trademark is that they specifically _don 't_ want any goodwill,
| and that _want_ to maintain their reputation as ruthless
| litigators.
| mcv wrote:
| How is it that Oracle gets to claim this trademark at all? They
| never created it, Netscape did. Oracle bought Sun which could
| have challenged Netscape for naming JavaScript after Java, but
| I don't think they ever did.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Isn't the entire reason because they funded JavaScript and in
| order to protect Java's trademark they maintain it just in
| case? I think that's the real simple answer. Feel free to
| educate me if someone knows different.
| rplnt wrote:
| "Corporate goodwill" is an oxymoron.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| its a euphemism for "avoiding reputational damage"
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| Confusing everyone about java license situation is another
| example.
|
| I think lawnmower metaphor never was accurate or helped to get
| it.
|
| Oracle is an alligator or a snake. A reptile. If you move, it
| will probably eat you alive. It wants to eat you, or part of
| you.
|
| It also lives in the waterhole, hoarding an essential resource.
| Not guarding or developing it, just sitting there.
|
| It is ancient and will never change.
|
| It's not alligator's fault for being predator. It is it's
| nature
| wraptile wrote:
| > They have an opportunity to create some goodwill here
|
| This would be first event of that kind to my knowledge. I've
| been coding for 20 years and never heard anyone say anything
| good about Oracle other than their free hosting tier _is free_.
| Better late than never I guess!
| znpy wrote:
| Oracle has been not profiting at all but has also been pretty
| much neutral on the use of the Javascript trademark.
|
| "Developer communities" tend to create issues out of thin air,
| and that I don't like.
|
| In this case I'm siding with Oracle.
| Drakim wrote:
| > In this case I'm siding with Oracle.
|
| Only because you don't understand Trademarks. They are not
| copyrights.
|
| Trademarks exists to protect consumers, so they don't mix
| together companies and products that have too similar name or
| branding. So somebody can't release a product called iPhona
| for $600 in the hopes that somebody will overlook the typo
| and order it instead of an iPhone for $600.
|
| If a company is not offering a product based on a trademark,
| that trademark should actively be removed. Oracle is not
| using the JavaScript trademark.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Don't anthropomorphise the lawnmower.
| SergeAx wrote:
| Oracle is a lawyer company[0]. Trademarks and patents are
| lawyers' weapons. You don't donate nuclear warheads to your
| enemies.
|
| [0] https://www.globalnerdy.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2011/07/oracl... (can't find original XKCD,
| sorry)
| pikuseru wrote:
| Can I invent a language called Larry Ellison Script and trademark
| it
| binarymax wrote:
| IANAL. But yes I think we can.
| bapak wrote:
| Good luck with the cease and desist letters.
| spullara wrote:
| my guess is that they feel there is risk in releasing the
| javascript trademark to the java trademark.
| Hilift wrote:
| Imagine toiling all those years to make J* products usable, only
| to have Larry Ellison bigfoot everything.
| wiremine wrote:
| The cartoon explaining Oracle's org structure feels appropriate:
|
| https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/code-review-on-pr...
| calrain wrote:
| All the power to you Ryan!
| JHorse wrote:
| One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
| rswail wrote:
| Doesn't Oracle stand for "One Raging Asshole Called Larry
| Ellison"?
| cr125rider wrote:
| Oracle is the definition of legacy. If you're still using them
| you're behind in the market and behind your competitors.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Nashorn (the JS engine in the JDK) was the only teeth Oracle had,
| but they removed it, so what can they truly say they own that
| supports the fact they're building JavaScript?
| sradman wrote:
| GraalJS?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Thats not Oracle though I thought that was IBM? But if it is
| Oracle why did they submit nodejs as an example? They do not
| own nodejs (yet?) so it's bizarre.
| vips7L wrote:
| Graal is Oracle Labs. Their research arm.
| sgammon wrote:
| The application for the copyright predates GraalJs.
| vips7L wrote:
| Nashorn is still actively developed.
| ingen0s wrote:
| ughmmm.so squatting.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| oracle holding javascript just froze it ,no one else can touch it
| ,they not doing anything with it but that nothing is exactly what
| kept it stable without fights or rebrands or ai company trying to
| trademark over it. later then it can also open lane for anyone to
| grab and next holder might not be this quiet. oracle doing
| nothing ended up protecting it more imo
| pjmlp wrote:
| This looks like a distraction from Deno company.
|
| Everyone knows what powers companies like Oracle, so it isn't as
| if they would given up on this, unless told so by the courts.
|
| Maybe Deno the company should focus on making their actual
| business case, why pay for Deno instead of using node?
| rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
| >why pay for Deno
|
| Pay for Deno? I never had to do that, what am I doing wrong?
| pjmlp wrote:
| You're not using their SaaS platform, which like Vercel with
| Next.js, is what keeps development rolling in.
|
| What many are doing wrong is not paying for our tools like in
| other professions, and then acting surprised when the authors
| decide to pivot for something else, when funding dries out.
| psnehanshu wrote:
| It's a great move for the brand Deno. They will be seen as the
| saviour of javascript.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Maybe between some folks, for me it looks like acquisition of
| node market share isn't going as expected, so we get these
| kind of activities.
| jackgavigan wrote:
| Maybe it's time to revert to Javascript's original name:
| LiveScript.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Revert it to a Lisp too
| wiseowise wrote:
| JavaScript is not Lisp.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| It was meant to be
| xdennis wrote:
| While JavaScript has obviously become generic, why do people
| actually care to make it official? Has anyone ever gotten in
| trouble for saying "JavaScript"?
| timvisee wrote:
| If not now, maybe in the future
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Oracle is the only company in history that spawned a huge
| consultants network just to "survive" their license audits.
|
| Google results: Oracle License Audit Survival
| Guide for CIOs Handling Oracle's "Friendly" License
| Reviews How to Prepare for an Oracle License Audit
| How to Prepare For and Navigate an Oracle License Audit
| Top 7 Oracle Audit Triggers (And How to Avoid Them) Top 5
| Best Oracle License Consultant Firms 7 Questions to Ask
| When Engaging an Oracle Audit Defense
| rjpower9000 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I ended up reading through one of these --
| https://atonementlicensing.com/surviving-your-first-oracle-l...
| -- it's truly amazing/terrifying that it's so bad.
|
| It's hard to imagine how a company could be more extractive
| than this.
| pezo1919 wrote:
| We renamed master to main for nonsense. Broke everything. Still,
| companies and people were proud of it (lol).
|
| Why we do not just use EcmaScript from now on in conversations
| and as a trend so the issue is solved. A joke to me.
| wobblyasp wrote:
| What did it break for you? It was a relatively
| straightforwardly renaming process.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I've discovered submodules and build pipelines broken due to
| a changed name within the last year. Doesn't help that some
| people are late to the party and still changing things now.
| But, hey, at least I've done my part against slavery /s
| globular-toast wrote:
| Names are a funny thing. When gay marriage was still disputed I
| argued for just dropping the word "marriage" from law. My
| country has had civil partnerships available to all since 2000,
| which is gay marriage in everything but name. A decade later
| and people were still fighting for the name. I don't get it but
| language is a powerful thing and means a lot to some people.
|
| As for master->main, that was just fake activism by people
| desperately wanting to be a part of something but not prepared
| to put in any actual work to convince anyone of anything they
| don't already agree with. Convincing people to drop the name
| JavaScript would be difficult due to the attachment and
| perceived loss to an evil company.
| tolmasky wrote:
| I propose we rename JavaScript to "UntypedScript".
| SwiftyBug wrote:
| You have my sword.
| tolmasky wrote:
| In all seriousness, let's just rename it "WebScript".
| WebAssembly, WebGPU, WebRTC, WebWorkers. It fits. And it seems
| like there's no active trademark for it too (although I
| admittedly did not do a super sophisticated search).
|
| The "Java" prefix still confuses new users, not to mention
| "bizdev" people, and probably leads to legal issues beyond just
| the trademark. "JavaScript" has always sucked as a name, we're
| just used to it now. Why are we fighting so hard for it? Let's
| just take this as an opportunity to name it something that
| actually makes sense. It will _maybe_ be sort of annoying for a
| few years, but I 'm certain one day we'll look back and not
| believe we used to call it "JAVA Script".
| andyferris wrote:
| I mean... did Oracle consult the government in Jakarta about
| their use of the term Java? There are more than 100 million
| people there and we squabble about the conotations of the name
| of a programming with the name of another programming language
| whose name has connotations about someone elses island which is
| _actually_ a connotation about some coffee some programmers
| drank who felt Jolt Cola is _so_ Microsoft and isn 't as cool
| as freshly roasted beans anymore (...in 1996).
|
| But WebScript I could actually get behind! (if the case fails)
| tolmasky wrote:
| I agree that Oracle's case has no merit, for all sorts of
| reasons. But the time investment is asymmetric. It is easy
| for them to drag their feet, it is easy for them to confuse
| the judge who is almost certainly unfamiliar with the bizarre
| naming history of this language, and they have nothing better
| to do. Oracle can throw 100 interchangeable lawyers at this.
| Meanwhile, this is sucking the time of unique individuals
| like Ryan Dahl. It is a tragedy that his attention should go
| to this.
|
| But this is especially so given that _JavaScript isn 't even
| a good name_. It would be one thing to fight this on
| principle if the name was _great_ , but it _isn 't_. In fact,
| the name was specifically originally chosen due to its
| confusion-causing powers -- the unfortunate reality is that
| JavaScript _was chosen precisely to ride the coattails of the
| then hot new technology Java._ This was a _horrible idea_
| from day one. No one would suggest I name a new unrelated
| programming language "SwiftScript" or "RustScript" today to
| benefit from the popularity of those languages. It would be
| both tacky and shortsighted. Is it tacky enough to change in
| isolation? No, it would just be yet another unfortunate part
| of tech culture, like "referer" only having 3 r's instead of
| 4. But it absolutely _is_ tacky enough to give up if we are
| facing some huge case against an actor that is quite
| literally infamous for their stubbornness in court. No one at
| Oracle is thinking about this for longer than 5 minutes,
| while it is causing tremendous grief to Ryan and half the
| JavaScript community. Why give them that? Let Oracle own _all
| the shitty Java-related trademarks_. We 're not even handing
| them a win. The JS trademark will become worthless once we
| all switch to WebScript, _and_ as an added bonus it won 't
| even accidentally provide even a tiny bit of free marketing
| for any other their technologies like JavaScript maybe does
| today. Their reward can be a step further toward of
| obscurity, self-excising themselves from their current
| unearned appearance in the history of the web whenever
| JavaScript is mentioned.
| wltr wrote:
| So much this! About 20 years ago, when I only started
| dealing with JS, I couldn't grasp that pathetic name. Why
| even have Java in there?
|
| Personally, I so much hate these so much weird nerdy stupid
| names. Gimp, anyone? These recursive acronyms like GNU,
| does somebody actually think that's funny?
|
| Count me in, I like web script.
| mr_toad wrote:
| That'll confuse the hiring managers and recruiters.
|
| "Your CV says that you use JavaScript/WebScript. Which one
| would you say you used most often?"
| lkirkwood wrote:
| This is a funny thought, but do you think this would really
| happen? Surely anyone hiring a programmer would be aware of
| this.
| undefeated wrote:
| Surely you've never read the job description for a
| programming position
| askonomm wrote:
| From what I understand of modern hiring practices, the
| automated systems match for exact keywords, and if
| WebScript is not in the system, you don't get matched, and
| no actual human will even see your resume.
| komali2 wrote:
| Oh, gosh, when was your last job hunt? As of 9 months ago I
| still heard a "This job requires Java so you'll be a great
| fit" from a recruiter when he saw JavaScript on my resume.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Oh no! Anyway...
| egorfine wrote:
| Oh, I mostly use ECMAScript these days.
| tolmasky wrote:
| You're thinking about it like a bug instead of a feature.
| When HTML5 was announced everyone expected it on your resume
| like every other buzzword. WebScript should be pitched like
| that: the _hot new thing_. Managers won't be confused (or
| rather, no more confused than usual), they'll be _excited_.
| And for the first time in tech history, people will actually
| have 5 years experience in a technology that was announced
| this year.
| zeroq wrote:
| Reminds me of that one recruiter: - I need to
| run a quick survey on your tech, ok? - But you have my
| CV, it should be rather obvious if I fit or not. Doh.
| Whatever. - Perfect. How many years of experience you
| have with JavaScript? - Dude, really? ... I don't know,
| I've been using it since '99. - Perfect. More than 3
| years it is. Onto the next question!
| donatj wrote:
| I was going to suggest just going back to it's original name of
| LiveScript but it looks like that was subsumed by a language
| from the creator of CoffeeScript. How rude.
|
| Early in my career, in the early 2000's I was tasked with
| modernizing a massive site that had many <script
| type="application/livescript"> tags throughout. I still don't
| fully understand, was it released to the public under this name
| at some point?
|
| My googling just now indicates there may have been just a
| single public beta of Netscape that called it that. How
| strange.
| jampekka wrote:
| I don't think the creator of CoffeeScript (Jeremy Ashkenas)
| was (directly) ever involved in LiveScript. LiveScript was
| forked from Coco which was forked from CoffeeScript.
|
| Wikipedia does claim Ashkenas was involved [1], but
| LiveScript website doesn't list him [2].
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveScript_(programming_l
| ang... [2] http://livescript.net/#thanks
| SwiftyBug wrote:
| We should just use ECMAScript. A big part of the ecosystem uses
| the terms esm, es5, es6, esnext, etc.
| tolmasky wrote:
| To be clear, I'd be fine with this, I just think it wouldn't
| catch on. It's just an awkward name, that exists for this
| same trademark reason, and was thus never expected to take on
| "marketing" duties (sort of like calling WebWorkers
| W3CWorkers instead).
|
| This is of course speculation, but I think people would
| interpret us trying to switch to "ECMAScript" as a sort of
| sulky defeat "wait so we're just going to let Oracle have
| JavaScript and just use the soulless spec name? No way, we
| should fight for JavaScript!" It feels like we're "settling"
| for the SKU number since we lost the name (again, due to the
| uniquely bizarre, but understandable in context, spec name).
|
| In other words, besides the "consistency" that WebScript
| offers (WebWorkers, WebGPU, etc.), the other thing it brings
| to the table is just being _something new and different_.
| "Hey! Let's move on from this whole debacle, here is a
| symbolic thing that represents a new chapter, with zero
| associated baggage." I am largely basing this off of the
| experience of "html5," which arguably addressed a similar
| non-technical debacle in the form of the W3C/WHATWG drama. It
| is surprising how effective a new name can be at putting a
| positive spin on things.
|
| Again, I personally have no issue with ECMAScript, I just
| think the boat has sailed on getting people to switch to
| that, and if we switch to _anything_ , the goal should be to
| make sure to get everyone onboard.
| tolmasky wrote:
| It occurs to me that "WebScript" actually solves another tricky
| problem: describing the thing people _mean_ when they say
| JavaScript, vs. the thing JavaScript actually, technically, is.
| You see, _technically_ , JS doesn't have half the functionality
| you're used to, like WebSockets, TextEncoder, fetch, or _even
| something as simple as the URL class_. In fact, JS does not
| _technically_ even "fully" support ESM modules, as major
| portions of that standard are delegated to other Web Platform
| APIs.
|
| There's good reasons for all of this of course, but from an end
| user perspective, it's pretty confusing that URL is not part of
| JS but encodeURIComponent is. And Uint8Array is part of JS but
| TextEncoder isn't. But the cool thing is that increasingly no
| one needs to worry about that because the non-browser JS
| runtimes have settled on the idea that they should implement
| the Web Platform APIs. So as a developer, you can just act as
| if WebSockets _is_ part of JavaScript.
|
| But there's no good name for this "collection" of standards
| that are together commonly accepted to be "JavaScript". No one
| says "JavaScript with browser-compliant modules and WebWorker
| additions...", and even saying "ECMAScript with the Web
| Platform Additions" is a mouthful. But you know what _does_
| convey "ECMAScript, the way you 're used to it in browsers"?
| WebScript.
|
| This very much makes the case for _not_ using ECMAScript, since
| ECMAScript still has a separate meaning. It is the pure
| language spec. Useful as a term for spec writers, pedantic
| everywhere else. Meanwhile, "WebScript" formalizes what people
| were sometimes (but not always) bending "JavaScript" to do
| before, and thus actually _does_ add "new utility" to the
| terminology, vs. just being a replacement synonym that avoid
| legal issues.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > In all seriousness, let's just rename it "WebScrip...
|
| This has approximately the same chances of success as the
| rebranding of Twitter
| joshdavham wrote:
| Will Oracle always legally own the JavaScript trademark? Or is
| there an eventual expiry date when it will become "public
| domain", etc?
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Patents and Copyrights expire. Trademarks can be renewed
| indefinitely.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| That would be a shame if Oracle killed JavaScript.
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