JavaScript Trademark Update
52 comments
·June 28, 2025maxk42
WD-42
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.
drdaeman
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.
relativeadv
Oracle is doing something petty and absurd? Are you sure?
lvl155
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.
Someone1234
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
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
oracle does engineering just fine, and they are actually still around...so maybe Sun was doing it wrong
raverbashing
But did Sun actually add anything in relation to JavaScript?
osigurdson
Those days will probably never be behind us because incentive structures in companies make employees risk averse.
fluidcruft
When has Oracle ever added value whatsoever to the tech ecosystem?
homebrewer
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
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
tombert
I don’t love Oracle, but GraalVM is pretty cool. That and the vanilla JVM keeps getting updates.
ternaryoperator
They've done a ton of stuff with Java, including open-sourcing it in its entirety.
jennyholzer
Everyone uses “JavaScript” to describe a language.
Oracle is a parasite.
Waterluvian
Aren’t there laws about this? Where “Kleenex” becomes so universally }}]%^* )!;&
90s_dev
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.
nailer
If Oracle win we rename the language JS. JS stands for nothing.
throwawayoldie
How about OS, where the "S" now stands for "sucks", and the meaning of the "O" is left as an exercise for the reader.
AlienRobot
No, we rename Javascript to Typelessscript.
moritzwarhier
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.
null
moralestapia
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
> 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.
mbStavola
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
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...
bobajeff
This is one of the things that makes me believe that humanity has just about run it's course.
zeroCalories
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.
jenadine
Btw, The language is called ECMAScript
mmastrac
Literally nobody, outside of formal documents and perhaps pedants, uses that catastrophe of a name.
ajkjk
no it's not, that's a bureaucratic hoop-jump
echelon
Does everyone else pronounce that as "eczema script", too?
throwawayoldie
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.
charcircuit
>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...
sockmeistr
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
Rename it GoScript this time around.
scosman
Java is a Sun product, but Java has nothing to do with Javascript except a confusing name overlap.
Javascript was written at Netscape.
nailer
No. I was around then and nobody thought of JS as a Sun product.
alberth
> 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.
Someone1234
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.
ray023
"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.
nosefurhairdo
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?
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.