Indeed. When they said:

> The unauthorized display of our client's intellectual property is likely to cause consumers encountering this app to mistakenly believe that it emanates from, or is provided under a license from, Oracle.

I think most of us would agree that no, literally almost no one familiar with JavaScript would have believed that app to “emanate from, or be provided under a license from, Oracle”.

I know that Oracle owns Java, but I never would have guessed that they had any ownership of the JavaScript name. When I think of JS, Oracle is like the last company I would think of.

When I think of JS, I think of Brendan Eich, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, web development, Node.js, etc.

I believe trademark laws require trademark holders to actively enforce them or they run the risk of losing the trademark when it comes up in something that actually matters.

Although really Oracle should have the sense to see the state of the landscape and just drop it. It's become a generic term - in fact, it always was.

If it's the case that by not going after the user of JavaScript, they would be putting their Java trademark in peril, then perhaps a solution would be for oracle to put out a notice putting the term JavaScript under a creative commons commerical non-attribution license.

That way, they keep everything 'java' protected, without the poor PR of targeting the use of the term 'JavaScript'.

Trademark is not the same thing as copyright. A work might be affected by both, but "put it under a CC license" does nothing to make the trademark freely usable. To make the trademark freely usable, they simply have to abandon it or create a liberal trademark policy like Mozilla's or Wikimedia's (or even CCs).

(IANAL.)

I am primarily a JavaScript developer by trade and I literally didn't know it even originated at Oracle. And I'm sure I'm not alone. The trademark should be invalidated.

It didn't originate there, they acquired the rights to the name when they bought sun

I knew that about Java but I didn't know the same was true of JavaScript

JavaScript originated at Netscape, not Sun. I assume Sun owned the trademark because it's so close to Java)

I believe they acquired the rights to 'Java' and they're arguing that gives them the rights to 'JavaScript'.

Which is fair-ish -- it should have never been named Javascript to begin with.

No, Oracle owns the "JavaScript" trademark, it's separate from "Java".

http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75026640&caseType=SERIAL_N...

" When I think of JS, Oracle is like the last company I would think of." - Check out Oracle JET (JavaScript Toolkit), it's an open source library for modern web developers : https://github.com/oracle/oraclejet

Which no 'modern' web developer would go anywhere near!

What the hell is this...

LOL

Google taught everybody a lesson, avoid Oracle products.

I think you're accidentally proving the point you're attempting to debunk.

Wait, Oracle? On GITHUB? Now I have seen everything...

I assume it's some kind of preemptive move, before they sue Github.

If I had to explain Oracle to anyone I would only say that their motto is simply "Do all evil."

It's more accurately "take money" — don't anthropomorphize them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246

Heh and adding on to that... "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil"

I thought it was premature optimisation.

No, it’s shared mutable state. The belief there is only one true instance of state, and everything must use it directly.

That's a good one, but I'll appeal to authority here and make the fallacious argument that I'm correct because Donald Knuth said so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_optimization#When_to_o...

Do you truly believe that?

Just asking ...

Nice! I see what you did there.

It took me a while though:

I was wondering if this statement is self-contradictory or not. Eventually, I figured it is not necessarily self-contradictory, but that it declares itself to be an evil belief (since it is a statement of universal truth that declares that the belief of any universal truth is evil).

Of course I think it’s just incorrect.

For my sake, I believe in truth and good, and that if someone finds a good thing, they should tell others about it in a respectful and loving way.

Relativism: There is no absolute truth except the fact that there is no absolute truth.

Nihilism: Nothing matters except for the fact that nothing matters.

Do you?

Seems like it struck a nerve with a lot of people. Not sure what their problem is.

I didn't downvote you, but I believe I understand why folks got upset. It appears that you are taking a passive aggressive dig at all religions because the parent comment referenced a Christian biblical verse (1 Timothy 6:10). While this usually isn't an issue here, the comment appears unrelated to the main conversation and may be seen as trolling.

I could be wrong.

I actually didn’t even know that was a biblical verse, how would I? I’m not particularly religious. I figured it was just some other quote people say. My source was straight from German physicist and mathematician Max Born.

I was facetiously trying to point out the irony in your statement. I should have added a ;) .

I think the emphasis on `you` made it seem as if you were directly attacking the parent.

How does one differentiate between you the OP and you the reader?

Why was that comment flag killed?

I could tell two sentences in that was a Brian C quote.

Ethics is the difference.

Yup and the interpretation of law doesn't need to be ethical. Law and justice are quite different things.

what a treat. thanks for sharing this video.

I expect one day to learn that Larry Ellison bought that Hawaiian island in order to hunt people for sport.

I mean he dresses and grooms himself like the evil alternate universe version of a nice person. And everything I’ve heard is that he’s a horrible manchild.

Not that I'd have a detailed knowledge about him, but there is:

https://givingpledge.org/Pledger.aspx?id=192

Something which only few persons choose to do

With Larry, there's going to be a self interest angle driving it completely. Literally 0 chance of him "doing good".

Feel free to dig into the details though if you want. Shouldn't be too hard to figure out where the rot is. :)

If you have relevant details regarding his giving pledge I'm interested to learn them.

But rot, self interest? Not everybody can't do no evil. If he goes through with his pledge (which I assume) he will have done a lot of good. And he will have done it voluntarily. Doesn't make hime a saint, but...

(..almost ;-) - i'm joking; btw, did/will Steve Jobs, Larry and Sergey give away such a substancial part of their wealth?)

One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.

Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=38m28s (quote at 38m28s)

His major contribution to society is some entertaining sailboat racing.

Well, it's not like the AC72 and AC50 rules were a lot more popular to certain groups than Oracle is to developers. The AC75 is both a reaction to and rejection of Ellison's vision.

More than my contribution.

Bryan Cantrill on Oracle: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2044

It does seem they always go for the path that will maximize profits, evil (note not a legal term, but a moral one) and pull everyone down to the bottom with their actions.

I am convinced if there was a crossroads with a payout of x dollars for both choices, but with a pretty nasty outcome for the community for choice y as the distinguishing factor, Oracle would pick y in a heartbeat.

I think a good description for Oracle is "the demon that pulls everyone down to hell with them..."

Manny many years ago, I read a story about Oracle:

In a big budget project, they had implemented a report, like sales per month or something similar. The requirement was to sort the result by month. Any sane person would sort it by the order the months happens in a year, like January, February, March, etc... But not Oracle: April, August, December, February, January, July, June, March, May, November, October, September.

Technically they are sorted... and they requirements only said sort by month. To get it fixed the customer had to pay Oracle more money, since they changed changed the requirements.

At least there's no pretense

At times they do release some cool new software though, e.g. GraalVM.

But "Do all evil." is trademarked by google... :D :D :D

It’s also the trademark owner of “MySQL”, which I discovered when Google AdWords rejected some of my client’s ads for having “MySQL” in them (the client’s product integrates with the database).

I spent weeks and many back-and-forth emails and calls with AdWords support trying to explain that 1) our use of the term is well within Oracle’s guidelines, and 2) no, I am not going to contact Oracle to fill out a permission form for me.

It didn’t work. Not even with Level 2 support.

Thankfully, AdWords policy enforcement is completely random and nonsensical so I just duplicated the ads several times until one of them did not get flagged.

If you have a pretty low opinion of Oracle just because of that, you don't know much about Oracle.

Are you saying the reality is much worse? Or that Oracle has a bright side?

Oracle exists mainly to make Microsoft look good.

Please, Oracle exist only to make money. Microsoft looking good is just an amusing side effect.

There isn't a bright side about Oracle, not even using their products.

It's old school software selling, influence the decision maker and the job is done

The former, Oracle is pretty much the devil of the tech world.

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

Those Hawaiian islands aren't cheap, you know...

It's one of the market leader in enterprise software and database for decades. Don't be just another hater.

"Suyash Joshi is a a senior software engineer at Oracle"

Next time, just put "Disclaimer: I work for Oracle"

Disclosure, not disclaimer

Normally I would agree, but we are talking about Oracle.

And it's not going to stay that way through legal bludgeoning. Where's the technical innovation? Where's the work that's going to make working with an Oracle database package something less akin to being chased by a swarm of bees? Where's the developer tooling which doesn't make SQL Server Management Studio look like a paragon of user experience (which it very much isn't)?

Where's the documentation for PeopleSoft which actually makes any sense? (I suspect the product itself no longer makes any sense, which would explain much).

It really feels like Oracle once had amazing technology but fell into the trap of an unmaintainable nightmare and have fallen back on the legal route to try to retain their dominance.

Codd, at IBM, invented the relational database (though not SQL). And yet, Oracle got their rdb to market before IBM. They subsequently marketed it as a way to integrate heterogeneous systems - which IBM could not do (they had to champion their own machines). Amazing - stealing fire from the gods (as Microsoft later did...)

Unfortunately, while the community advantages of having a dominant interoperation mechanism are real - like having a common tongue - it rewarded the means of attaining dominance. A sales culture. A zero-sum game. It's not enough that I win, others must lose.

And here we are.

I’ve never heard a developer say good things about Oracle databases though.

Being the #1 doesn’t mean you’re right. It just means your ads work.

I've used a vast array of databases over the years, from Open Source to expensive vendor stuff. Oracle always seemed ridiculously overpriced for what you got. MS Sql Server is the most common enterprise RDBMS I've encountered and is by no means cheap (at enterprise level) but by goodness it's wonderful compared to Oracle.

Being rich and successful puts them above criticism?

Hmm, so JavaScript was conceived at Netscape in 1995 according to Wikipedia. After the release Sun must have registered the "JavaScript" trademark instead of going after Netscape. Any idea why they did that?

Wasn't their inaction risking to lose the entire Java trademark by not defending it against Netscape? Does anyone know more about the history here?

What would Google do today if someone named their language DartScript? Or what would Apple do if someone released SwiftScript?

Sun was encouraging Netscape to include the JVM in their browser for applets, and generally trying to promote Java as the Next Big Thing. The in-browser scripting language was going to be called "LiveScript", but Sun asked them to change it to "JavaScript" to strengthen the Java brand, and make the syntax more closely resemble C-family languages.

Wow - I heard it was called JavaScript to cash in on the familiarity of the name Java, but I didn’t realize it was at the behest of Sun.

If you look at the Java timeline, the full Java marketing blitz wasn’t in full swing. JavaScript was announced on December 4, 1995 and Java (alpha) was public in March of the same year. A stable Java wasn’t available until 1996. It was more coordinated than riding the coattails.

> the full Java marketing blitz wasn’t in full swing

Pun unintended I guess, but still funny.

>Between this and Oracle's ongoing lawsuit against Google for their use of Java in Android, I have a pretty low opinion of Oracle.

You won't find any argument here

You must not have a lot experience with Oracle if you had even a moderately rosy opinion of Oracle. In my experience Oracle products are stupendously overpriced. They have been riding their dot-com boom clout in the hollow husk of a company.

The only weapons Oracle has are vendor lock in and crushing competition with litigation.

I always assumed it was because that was Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" era and they didn't want to use the name "Java" but did want to imply that it was compatible. Also at the time, pretty sure that Sun still owned Java?

If I recall correctly, it was called JScript because it wasn't actually fully compatible and because it had extended stuff - there was a JScript host for Windows scripting at one point, and there was talk about using it for ASP instead of VBScript. I'm not sure if that was ever actually implemented. Also I suspect Microsoft wanted to have their own branding.

Visual J++ on the other hand was because Sun sued them over a Java implementation which wasn't actually compatible with Java, and misuse of the trademark, and all that kind of thing, so Microsoft weren't allowed to call it Java anymore. This ultimately led to the development of C#, so it was probably for the good in the long term, apart from some of the bits they copied from Java in what was presumably an attempt to make it more a direct alternative.

Jscript asp was a real thing. “Run jscript on the client and the sever” was supposed to be a big time/labor saving. Ala nodejs