JavaScript Trademark Captured By Oracle
After the purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, the use of the JavaScript trademark for some purposes is no longer permitted.
In this article, I would like to talk about a new challenge in the web world that has caused trouble for many people and has been criticized by many people.
LiveScript was a scripting language written by Brendan Eich for Netscape in 1995. To compete with Microsoft, they cooperated with Sun Microsystems, the owner of Java, to exchange products and changed the name to JavaScript for promotional purposes.
Netscape fails in competition with Microsoft and disappears, Sun Microsystems also gets into financial problems and is bought out by Oracle in 2010, and Oracle becomes the owner of everything that belonged to Sun Microsystems, such as the Java language or the JavaScript trademark.
Oracle decides to make the most of this purchase, suing Google for using Java code in Android and getting its products that use the JavaScript name into trouble. As a result of one of these problems, Apple is forced to delete the program that uses the name JavaScript in its name from the App Store.
Because of these problems, many developers decided to use the name of the standard version of JavaScript, EcmaScript, and this was one of the reasons why the name ECMAScript became more common.
These problems went so far that Ryan Dahl, the creator of NodeJS and DenojS, had to react to these events. A few days ago, on September 3, 2022, he published on his blog a post addressed to Oracle, titled “Dear Oracle, Please Release the JavaScript Trademark”, asking Oracle to release the JavaScript trademark.
We talked about the new challenges in the web world and found out how serious it has become, and found out the corner of Oracle’s politics and realized why many developers do not have a good feeling about Oracle. I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions so I can write better content.
