This week, as a Thanksgiving present to the tech industry, Deno Land petitioned the US Patent and Trademark Office to cancel Oracle’s JavaScript trademark.
JavaScript–which helpfully has little to do with Java–is a programming language for client-side web applications. Most of the interaction between you and websites, like filling in forms in e-commerce sites, uses JavaScript. It is a ubiquitous language. JavaScript was developed by Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications, in the 1990s. The trademark was acquired by Oracle Corporation in its 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
Deno Land is the company behind the Deno project, a modern JavaScript runtime. A JavaScript runtime is the environment where JavaScript code is executed, including outside of a web browser. The most famous JavaScript runtime is Node.JS, which was developed by Ryan Dahl, the founder of Deno Land. Node.JS is also wildly popular.
Programming languages usually don’t enjoy much trademark protection, because they tend to be enabling technologies rather than commercial products. Most popular programming languages have accepted standards for their development that are set by standards organizations rather than single owners. After all, programming languages are much more useful if many developers use them, instead of a few. A trademark is the way to distinguish the official source of products, and for successful programming languages, this role typically falls to standards bodies rather than any one organization. JavaScript, for example, is governed by the ECMA-262 standard for ECMAScript.
Brandon Eich, one of the key developers of JavaScript, quipped that the name “ECMAScript” was a compromise between the organizations involved in standardizing the language, especially Netscape and Microsoft, whose disputes dominated the early standards sessions. “ECMAScript was always an unwanted trade name that sounds like a skin disease.” If the mark is declared generic or abandoned and no longer owned by Oracle, there is hope that the standard could finally be named after JavaScript.
The petition alleges primarily that the trademark has been abandoned, and that JavaScript is now a generic term, and not associated with Oracle. Neither Sun nor Oracle ever really exploited JavaScript as a commercial product, but Oracle has, according to the petition, engaged in enforcement activity to prevent others from using the name–thus endearing itself to the tech community in its usual fashion.
The petition says:
An open letter to Oracle discussing the genericness of the phrase “JavaScript,” published at https://javascript.tm/, was signed by 14,000+ individuals at the time of this Petition to Cancel, including notable figures such as Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, and the current editors of the JavaScript specification, Michael Ficarra and Shu-yu Guo. There is broad industry and public consensus that the term “JavaScript” is generic.
It’s time for Oracle to do the right thing and relinquish its hegemony here. JavaScript has enough trouble with its “THIS” keyword, without a trademark burden to make it worse
