Oracle justified its JavaScript trademark with Node.js–now it wants that ignored
83 comments
·February 4, 2025rtpg
LoganDark
> [0]: Again, I'm not paying for the lawyers or doing anything useful at all!
It sucks that these kinds of disclaimers are necessary these days. I've also had more than my fair share of "you're not helping so you don't get to have an opinion"
MaxGripe
Just under 30 years ago, when I was starting my IT studies, I had an older colleague who was a great authority to me. When I began learning about RDBMS options, I called him to ask, „What do you think about Oracle?”. He just shouted, „Total crap!!!” and that was enough for me. Since then, to this day, I’ve never touched Oracle.
tw04
I don't think it's necessarily fair to say Oracle is total crap. For decades they were more performant and had more features than most anything else on the market. They supported scale-out clustering on linux with Oracle RAC. They were early adopters of high performance NFS moving the NFS stack out of the linux kernel and directly into the database with DirectNFS. They built a clustered filesystem for block-based clusters (OCFS).
HOWEVER, the way they run their business is horrible. Oracle the product was various versions of awesome to just OK. Oracle the business is a modern-day mafioso shakedown.
sakesun
People either love or hate Oracle back then. I was in the love group. However, in recent days, Oracle is pretty irrelevant, imho.
duxup
Yeah every argument about Oracle being bad is business related, not tech.
rizky05
[dead]
LorenDB
The best part of this article for me was seeing that Oracle's screenshots were taken in IE.
Yes, those are old by now, but it's still a blast from the past.
pseudosavant
IE11 was still 6-years old at the time of that screenshot (based on the Node versions), and 3 months from EOL on pre-Windows 10.
xmprt
I wouldn't say 2019 is particularly old. I didn't even know IE still existed at the time - I thought it had been replaced by Edge.
jsheard
Believe it or not IE was still supported in some capacity until 2022, and the underlying Trident engine is still supported until at least 2029. Edge has an official "IE Mode" which switches the backend from Chromium to Trident, effectively turning it into IE with a modern skin. Microsoft support lifecycles are no joke.
userbinator
which switches the backend from Chromium to Trident, effectively turning it into IE with a modern skin
I wish they'd done the opposite instead: same UI, but with a better browser engine.
MiddleEndian
>Microsoft support lifecycles are no joke.
Except for Mail and Calendar that they randomly decided to murder and replace with some Outlook webapp garbage.
datavirtue
That sounds dangerous.
ndneighbor
Knowing Oracle, they will take it to court if they can. To paraphrase Cantrill, it's a company that behaves very much like a lawnmower.
ggm
If you want to personify the mistaken belief "if a company can make money legally then it is obliged in law to do it, to maximise shareholder value" thing: Oracle is that company. There is only one goal. Immediate reporting cycle uptick benefit. There is no other goal.
I can think of almost no play they have made in the market which has any longterm net beneficial outcome for the entire market, despite "grow a bigger market" being a thing. We would have ZFS in a lot more places, if Oracle hadn't made a short term licence play, and muddied the waters.
We used to hate on a range of companies about their IBM like qualities (market dominance, bad behaviour inside the law) but now, IBM is a pale shadow, and Oracle has taken the crown.
spuz
I wish I could agree that Oracle are somehow acting in the interest of their shareholders but I fail to see how they benefit by spending hundreds of thousands on lawyers to try to protect a trademark that makes them zero revenue and on the whole damages their brand.
nhumrich
It's pushed by a teenager and cuts grass?
kingforaday
Anyone else read the article and say Oracle JET? What is that?
threecheese
The npm package for Oracle JET, with ~1000 weekly downloads, has four dependent packages on npm, and if you walk down the dependency tree it’s nearly entirely other Oracle packages or long dead demos/one-shots.
That 1,000 weekly downloads could be entirely from CI pipelines for those other Oracle projects.
The phone call is coming from inside the house, Larry!
ikesau
It is literally for the best if you don't find out, to not legitimize this ridiculous argument they're making that JavaScript hasn't genericized.
But because you'll be too curious to resist now, from what I can tell it's a preact bootstrapping script with 500 weekly downloads on NPM.
davidsojevic
First time I'd ever heard of it too; I ran straight to Google and it only came up with results for "Breville Oracle Jet Espresso Machine" which interestingly enough Breville seem to hold a trademark on "Oracle" itself in the machines and tools class!
bjt12345
I've always sat there wondering if my Breville expresso machine is running Breville JavaScript(c) inside it.
tom1337
Yea their CLI has 510 Weekly Downloads on npm and JET itself nearly 1000.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/@oracle/ojet-cli https://www.npmjs.com/package/@oracle/oraclejet
dangrossman
A date picker widget I tossed on NPM 13 years ago gets 32,000 downloads per week. 510 a week is background activity, that's indexing bots or one org's CI system.
tom1337
I totally agree. I thought about adding a paragraph about how it seems like even oracle themself doesn’t use it on production (cause otherwise it’d have probably more downloads due to developers, CI, you name it) but it is possible they use a internal npm proxy with a cache. Anyway it’s laughable that this package is the reason they base their argument on.
realusername
In the Node world that's basically a side project of a single dev.
phpnode
it's Oracle's UI library that they encourage their official partners to use. I've had the misfortune of doing some consulting for a company that used it, it's actually very fully featured but the internals are totally insane and very dated.
floydnoel
I'm glad this is being fought, Oracle is a demon.
> The major implementations of JavaScript are in the browsers built by Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Microsoft
Isn't MS's browser just Chromium? Weird to add them to the list when they don't build a browser any more. Why not add Brave, etc?
t0ps0il
> Weird to add them to the list when they don't build a browser any more
It seems like their browser engine is still being supported for use in "Universal Windows Platform" apps, or at least that's what Wikipedia says.
profsummergig
I've always been fascinated by Larry Ellison ever since I read his biography (God something something).
What's insane is how much of the culture he controls. In tech and outside. He's about to own the largest entertainment company, he owns some of the best real estate in the world, and he owns MySQL and Java.
Genius (or maybe evil genius).
psunavy03
There's a reason the joke is that "Oracle" stands for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
profsummergig
The crazy thing is that ORACLE was a CIA program that Larry got a contract for. He named his company after it.
A genius aspect of Larry is that, like Steve Jobs (his best friend), he knew how to milk a gifted 50x programmer. There was a co-founder who did all the heavy code writing, while Larry did the schmoozing (not an unimportant job).
pjmorris
'The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison[0]', Mike Wilson. It's a worthwhile read, and I think the joke is funny.
[0] - God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison
culi
> So last November, I filed a formal petition with the USPTO through my company, Deno, to cancel Oracle’s “JavaScript” trademark. Among other things, we pointed out that in 2019, Oracle renewed its trademark by submitting a screenshot of the Node.js website—a project I created—as proof of use, despite having no affiliation with it.
Clown world. We go about thinking our legal system might have some flaws but generally "works"
toddmorey
Hear me out: the web / oss community could absolutely band together and rebrand JavaScript. Could be: LiveScript, WebScript, etc.
There would be good support and we could do it fairly swiftly. To hell with Oracle.
Etheryte
We could also rebrand it as Js and it would be the funniest thing ever. Few things would make me happier than seeing Oracle being screwed by something that's technically correct, but clearly nonsense to every living human being.
null
mrmincent
I like NetScript, give a little callback to Netscape.
null
xiphias2
Is ,,Oracle not controlling JavaScript'' really a good argument?
Who wants Oracle to start controlling it?
We're mostly better off leaving it a gray area maybe until Oracle gets more aggressive with it.
nhumrich
Yes because in trademark lawsuits, proving a brand doesn't actually use it/control it, is a very common way for them to lose the trademark.
krashidov
I hope this is good marketing for Deno and not just a huge distraction. I feel like Bun is running circles around them right now. I feel like there might even be room for 3 winners (Bun, Deno, Node) but I don't understand the point of this.
If Deno wins this battle will that make we want use Deno more?
bsimpson
I think it's a passion project for the founder, who built his career on JS and is offended that Oracle (a company famous for deploying lawyers instead of technological expertise) claims to control it.
sayrer
They are using the wrong tactics. They should use the "Kleenex" argument and say it's generic. But what do I know.
svieira
They're doing both - the issue is that the fraud issue either gets dropped (which Ryan doesn't want to do) or it blocks the second "generic" issue until resolved.
> Oracle waited until the deadline to file this motion, delaying their response to the real issue: whether “JavaScript” is a generic term.
and
> Oracle won’t even discuss whether “JavaScript” should remain a trademark until they’ve finished dragging out this fraud claim.
> This legal maneuvering puts us in a difficult position:
> 1. Agree to drop the fraud claim, letting them get away with misrepresenting their trademark renewal.
> 2. Spend months fighting this procedural issue before even getting to the real debate.
aardvarkr
But they are… genericness is a key part of their argument.
>Our petition challenges Oracle’s trademark on three grounds:
>Genericness – JavaScript is a widely used programming language, not an Oracle product.
>Abandonment – Oracle does not control, maintain, or enforce the trademark.
>Fraud on the USPTO – Oracle submitted misleading evidence in its renewal filing.
I appreciate Ryan taking this up, and the updates are interesting.
Obviously I'm not paying for the lawyers but it feels like "oh Oracle is trying to add months of delays" feels pretty normal. Only months! If the process just trudges along for a couple of years before reaching a "good" conclusion, still worth doing!
And very happy that this is an actual legal proceeding and "try to sign a petition asking Oracle nicely" is no longer what is being looked at. It's Oracle!
Imagine how far along ago we would be[0] if 2 years ago the lawyers started getting involved. Sometimes you just gotta do the thing that takes forever. Or at least try in parallel?
[0]: Again, I'm not paying for the lawyers or doing anything useful at all!