This is so true. And in my experience Oracle's main business seems to be getting companies to sign complicated contracts, waiting a year or two, and then suing them for some infraction so that they can extort another contract from them. I haven't met an Oracle product yet that can't be done better by either free software or a less litigious company.

There is nothing I take more glee in than listening to bcantrill talk negatively of Oracle. Whenever Oracle comes up in one of his talks or a podcast, I know I'm in for a treat.

Blood pathogen then?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35908391

GP is saying from a purely mechanical, non-human standpoint Oracle's actions don't make sense.

This is one of my all-time favorite talks! So good. Thank you Bryan Cantrill!

Apparently not everybody got the Lawnmower Memo, so thanks for posting that again, as a reminder to people like sprash who think I should have "sincerely asked if you are allowed to publish the [NeWS source] code". As if sincerity would help, and as if I haven't been sincerely asking since 1986.

I'll also sincerely ask: Does anybody at Oracle know how I can get in touch with their HR department to find out what ever happened to my Sun 401k plan? Because nobody will answer my calls, and it's a lot of money of mine plus 33 years of interest they owe me that they're holding on to, which they inherited from Sun and then disappeared from all known records (except for a record that says it once existed and Oracle has it, but no other info), and they won't pick up the phone or return my email, no matter how "sincerely" I ask or how long I wait on hold.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44370636

sprash 4 days ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Ancient X11 scaling technology

> 1994

Apparently you have to be criticizing X11 for more than three decades now. Since you seem to know your stuff, could you please post a link to your git repository containing your personal display server that solves all the problems?

DonHopkins 4 days ago | prev | next [–]

Since they bought Sun Microsystems, Oracle now owns the rights to the NeWS source code, so unfortunately I'm not legally allowed to post the NeWS server source code on my Github page, although I spent many years unsuccessfully fighting to make NeWS free and evangelizing it to anyone who would listen, like RMS and my colleagues and customers at Sun:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/rms.news.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/news-ooo-review...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/questionaire.tx...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/grasshopper.msg...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/sevans.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/Explanation.txt

[...]

sprash 4 days ago | parent | next [–]

> Oracle owns the rights to the NeWS source code so I'm not allowed to post it on my Github page.

They are certainly not making any money with it right now. All patents should be expired by now. Have you ever sincerely asked if you are allowed to publish the code? [...]

DonHopkins 4 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

[...] Ha ha! Good luck, kiddo. Have you ever tried asking a lawnmower for favors? Do you really think "sincerity" would help?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728

https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s

[...]

Hahahahaha

Ignoring how Sun/Oracle's shenanigans with ZFS don't nearly account for "90% of their brand damage"...

> simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL

That can't be done at this point. Owing to a decision that arose right here from a discussion on HN, the ZFS maintainers adopted a policy in 2016 to opt out of the CDDL's built-in "any subsequent version" clause for new source files:

    ~/scratch/zfs$ grep --exclude-dir=.git -Ire "Common Development and Distribution License" -A 2 | grep -ie "\(Version 1\.0 only\|\<only\>.*\<version\>\)" | wc -l
    821

> They could reverse 90% of their brand damage

Their stock is 50% higher than it was a year ago.

Not quite sure this is doing them damage.

>by simply updating CDDL

How about a simpler solution, just relicense everything to BSD / MIT.

> They could reverse 90% of their brand damage in one swing by simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL

ZFS can be run under Linux - combining the Linux kernel with ZFS is a collective work (collection) of two independent works.

Why would they do that instead of the status quo, which is a gift for their lawyers to open later?

I don't associate Oracle and good will, and I don't think they care.

No, they could not. Anything Oracle does at this point will never undo the damage their brand has, or else you are a fool.

Oracle's official position is that CDDL is GPL compatible and no changes are needed.

[dead]

It’s a huge company with different divisions.

Oracle is one of the leading researchers in JIT compilers, garbage collectors, and language interpreters.

Back when Oracle acquired Sun they told us "Sun had more lawyers per capita than we"

Interpretation on the fact and metric and the need to tell I leave up to you

I think this is key. When you hire people to do work, they'll find stuff to do even if it isn't really necessary or a long term good for the company.

My favorite other example of this is when I see a UI redesign that didn't actually benefit anyone and was more a style change than anything, and sometimes actively makes usability worse (cough Liquid Glass cough) In those situations I always think "well, some designers on staff needed to justify their paychecks".

It's not even justify their salary. A lawyer's sole job is to advocate for the legal position of their client as zealously as possible. A really good chief counsel would go to the CEO and weigh up the merits of the marketing win of "losing" this case. A drone lawyer just files whatever is necessary (or even unnecessary) to fight the case even when it makes zero god damn sense. e.g. giving a person a 25 year prison sentence for stealing a slice of pizza.

They hired outside counsel to represent them in this matter.

> Also why would they give up something for nothing.

Because it provides zero value and costs something to keep.

Goodwill isn't "nothing", but good luck explaining that to a lawyer.

Quoting Bryan Cantrill? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2302s

Brand recognition for what?

No one thinks of Oracle when they see JavaScript.

How are they going to lose brand recognition, when a majority of people do not associate JavaScript with Oracle? The only language I associate with Oracle is Java.

The hell, you say!

"soul"? Oracle never had one in the first place.

its a euphemism for "avoiding reputational damage"

> In this case I'm siding with Oracle.

Only because you don't understand Trademarks. They are not copyrights.

Trademarks exists to protect consumers, so they don't mix together companies and products that have too similar name or branding. So somebody can't release a product called iPhona for $600 in the hopes that somebody will overlook the typo and order it instead of an iPhone for $600.

If a company is not offering a product based on a trademark, that trademark should actively be removed. Oracle is not using the JavaScript trademark.

Because Microsoft was trying to takeover and change Java, and Sun actually made Java. How is that in any way the same situation as this?

Specifically, this is why Internet Explorer had "JScript". Microsoft did bad things to Java and lost their trademark license.

There's plenty of useful to do. Too bad they don't get paid to do that.

To be clear, I'd be fine with this, I just think it wouldn't catch on. It's just an awkward name, that exists for this same trademark reason, and was thus never expected to take on "marketing" duties (sort of like calling WebWorkers W3CWorkers instead).

This is of course speculation, but I think people would interpret us trying to switch to "ECMAScript" as a sort of sulky defeat "wait so we're just going to let Oracle have JavaScript and just use the soulless spec name? No way, we should fight for JavaScript!" It feels like we're "settling" for the SKU number since we lost the name (again, due to the uniquely bizarre, but understandable in context, spec name).

In other words, besides the "consistency" that WebScript offers (WebWorkers, WebGPU, etc.), the other thing it brings to the table is just being something new and different. "Hey! Let's move on from this whole debacle, here is a symbolic thing that represents a new chapter, with zero associated baggage." I am largely basing this off of the experience of "html5," which arguably addressed a similar non-technical debacle in the form of the W3C/WHATWG drama. It is surprising how effective a new name can be at putting a positive spin on things.

Again, I personally have no issue with ECMAScript, I just think the boat has sailed on getting people to switch to that, and if we switch to anything, the goal should be to make sure to get everyone onboard.

It shows up as dead on on uspto: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75300777&caseSearchType=U...

You’re thinking about it like a bug instead of a feature. When HTML5 was announced everyone expected it on your resume like every other buzzword. WebScript should be pitched like that: the hot new thing. Managers won’t be confused (or rather, no more confused than usual), they’ll be excited. And for the first time in tech history, people will actually have 5 years experience in a technology that was announced this year.

Reminds me of that one recruiter:

  - I need to run a quick survey on your tech, ok?
  - But you have my CV, it should be rather obvious if I fit or not. Doh. Whatever.
  - Perfect. How many years of experience you have with JavaScript?
  - Dude, really? ... I don't know, I've been using it since '99.
  - Perfect. More than 3 years it is. Onto the next question!

Oh, I mostly use ECMAScript these days.

This is a funny thought, but do you think this would really happen? Surely anyone hiring a programmer would be aware of this.

Oh no! Anyway…

I don't think the creator of CoffeeScript (Jeremy Ashkenas) was (directly) ever involved in LiveScript. LiveScript was forked from Coco which was forked from CoffeeScript.

Wikipedia does claim Ashkenas was involved [1], but LiveScript website doesn't list him [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveScript_(programming_lang... [2] http://livescript.net/#thanks

I agree that Oracle's case has no merit, for all sorts of reasons. But the time investment is asymmetric. It is easy for them to drag their feet, it is easy for them to confuse the judge who is almost certainly unfamiliar with the bizarre naming history of this language, and they have nothing better to do. Oracle can throw 100 interchangeable lawyers at this. Meanwhile, this is sucking the time of unique individuals like Ryan Dahl. It is a tragedy that his attention should go to this.

But this is especially so given that JavaScript isn't even a good name. It would be one thing to fight this on principle if the name was great, but it isn't. In fact, the name was specifically originally chosen due to its confusion-causing powers -- the unfortunate reality is that JavaScript was chosen precisely to ride the coattails of the then hot new technology Java. This was a horrible idea from day one. No one would suggest I name a new unrelated programming language "SwiftScript" or "RustScript" today to benefit from the popularity of those languages. It would be both tacky and shortsighted. Is it tacky enough to change in isolation? No, it would just be yet another unfortunate part of tech culture, like "referer" only having 3 r's instead of 4. But it absolutely is tacky enough to give up if we are facing some huge case against an actor that is quite literally infamous for their stubbornness in court. No one at Oracle is thinking about this for longer than 5 minutes, while it is causing tremendous grief to Ryan and half the JavaScript community. Why give them that? Let Oracle own all the shitty Java-related trademarks. We're not even handing them a win. The JS trademark will become worthless once we all switch to WebScript, and as an added bonus it won't even accidentally provide even a tiny bit of free marketing for any other their technologies like JavaScript maybe does today. Their reward can be a step further toward of obscurity, self-excising themselves from their current unearned appearance in the history of the web whenever JavaScript is mentioned.

So you’re saying there’s a chance

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.

Damn I miss Sun Microsystems products.

And not a single company bothered to acquire Sun, after Gooogle torpedo it with Android (aka Google's J++ and .NET).

Had it not been for Oracle, Java would have died on version 6, and it remains to be seen what would have happened from anything else.

But did Sun actually add anything in relation to JavaScript?

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

I don’t love Oracle, but GraalVM is pretty cool. That and the vanilla JVM keeps getting updates.

They've done a ton of stuff with Java, including open-sourcing it in its entirety.

I think you underestimate the impact of their database on the world. They were a huge tech innovator in that part (and actually still are).

JavaScript was created as a wrapper for Java Applets. Oracle optained both when it bought Sun. The official name of the language is ECMA Script, but people insist on calling it the trademarked name because ECMA makes people think of an unpleasent skin condition.

Pretty sure that’s what the whole suit is about.

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.

No.

You're probably thinking of Genericisation. This isn't a law in the sense you probably mean, there is no statute about it, no legislature wrote it, nobody signed anything. Instead Genericisation is a legal doctrine related to the core idea in trademark law that we can't have exclusive use of descriptive marks.

Suppose you make a Big Car and you try to trademark "Big Car" as your exclusive mark for this new product. That's just describing the car, it's generic so you can't do that, it's OK to trademark "Giganticar" or "Waterluvian Car" or something because people can describe what their similar product is with the words "big car" but if you were allowed to own "Big Car" they can't do that.

Genericisation says well, if your product is so successful that now everybody knows what a "Waterluvian" is, and most people shown a new big car from say, Ford, say "Waterluvian" so that even Ford's sales people struggle to teach the guys on the forecourt not to call this a "Waterluvian" - that's now a generic term, you can't stop Ford just saying they're making a Waterluvian.

Genericisation only applies for crazy famous stuff. Kleenex is an example because your mom knows what a kleenex is, the guy who mows your lawn knows, Elon Musk knows, everybody knows, that's actually famous. Javascript probably wouldn't meet that requirement. My mother does not know what Javascript is, my boss does, because he's a software engineer, and maybe the average numerate graduate knows, but I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it.

Dilution is a related idea, also for very famous things. Dilution says for these famous things it's not OK to use the famous mark for any other purpose even though it's not related. So Disney toilet paper isn't OK, Coca-Cola brand vibrators, not OK, and so on. Nobody thinks the vibrator is a beverage, but Coke is so famous that doesn't matter. That doesn't impact here either.

We can just start calling it by its full Christian name, Eczemascript

How about OS, where the "S" now stands for "sucks", and the meaning of the "O" is left as an exercise for the reader.

No, we rename Javascript to Typelessscript.

I guees we can use a name from island near Java. BaliScript, MaduraScript, KarimunScript and so on.

How about douche-named-Larry-script. Take a page out of Apple’s playbook when they used the code name Butthead Astronomer.

https://www.engadget.com/2014-02-26-when-carl-sagan-sued-app...

Well, the models were in so far compatible as that JavaScript could access them to some degree from applets. Which is why they picked the name ...

Interesting point, but I'm not able to judge the trutfulness.

So the JVM has a runtime-enforced nominal type system (and object model) with classes.

But JS, to my knowledge, only has primitive types enforced at runtime, and no nomimal class system, unless you basically implement it yourself?

Uh, edit: maybe I get you now, it does have that in a way. But prototype identity and "instanceof" are rarely used in practise.

Maybe I'm missing your point here. Answering at late local time.

It would be so great to have a nominal type system in the browser though.

So many JS librarlies have their own version of it, and it causes insufferable headaches when combined with TypeScript.

Like, they use complicated hacks to make sure that their library objects are not structurall/duck typed.

I've discovered submodules and build pipelines broken due to a changed name within the last year. Doesn't help that some people are late to the party and still changing things now. But, hey, at least I've done my part against slavery /s

Good luck with the cease and desist letters.

There’s no acknowledgment of Node.js trademark on Deno.com … and the landing page is largely about how much better Deno is over Node.js.

Of all places to put trademark acknowledgement, it’d be there - and it’s missing.

https://deno.com/

AFAIK Sun gave Netscape free use of the JavaScript Trademark purely to side with Netscape against Microsoft in the browser wars, language wars, etc. I would think there is still something related to the original agreement.

It looks like JScript is still trademarked by Microsoft, why not ask them to do whatever the community thinks is right for ECMAScript names and then we can all refer to the language a little faster?

Trademark is not copyright.

But it is an Oracle trademark, [1].

And here's one (trivial, but valid) use of it [2].

I'm sure Ellison lawyer's can come up with thousands of examples of JavaScript being used within the context of Oracle's business activities.

The way to go is fight for genericization (or start calling it ECMAScript, lmao).

1: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75026640&caseSearchType=U...

2: https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2...

I've only heard Xerox be used like that once in my life. I was so confused what a company that invented the mouse had to do with what the person was talking about.

Thats not Oracle though I thought that was IBM? But if it is Oracle why did they submit nodejs as an example? They do not own nodejs (yet?) so it’s bizarre.

You're not using their SaaS platform, which like Vercel with Next.js, is what keeps development rolling in.

What many are doing wrong is not paying for our tools like in other professions, and then acting surprised when the authors decide to pivot for something else, when funding dries out.

Maybe between some folks, for me it looks like acquisition of node market share isn't going as expected, so we get these kind of activities.

What, "JavaThcript"?

JavaScript is not Lisp.

Oof.

Literally nobody, outside of formal documents and perhaps pedants, uses that catastrophe of a name.

If you are gonna change the name to anything, change it to js. But also, don’t change the name of the language, especially not to ECMAScript.

no it's not, that's a bureaucratic hoop-jump

Does everyone else pronounce that as "eczema script", too?

"We're now firmly in the TypeScript era. 67% of respondents stated they write more TypeScript than JavaScript code – while the single largest group consisted of people who only write TypeScript."

https://2024.stateofjs.com/en-US/usage/

The output would probably not be node, it would target the browser. TypeScript is the only real Node project worth a damn in open source.

bun is not faster than node, why do people keep thinking this lmao. v8 runtime is like x4 more performant than spidermonkey which is what bun uses.

Rename it GoScript this time around.

The JavaScript name came out of a cross-licensing deal between Netscape and Sun where Netscape would bundle a copy of the JVM with their browser. Sun needed a way to put the JVM on most Windows users' computers to get developers to write Java software instead of Windows software, and they knew Microsoft wouldn't ship a product that would threaten the Windows platform's domination, so they figured that bundling with Netscape was their next best option. If you read the initial JavaScript press release ( https://www.tech-insider.org/java/research/1995/1204.html ), it's mainly marketed as a way to write glue code to make it possible for Java applets (where the real application logic would go) to interact with an HTML page:

> With JavaScript, an HTML page might contain an intelligent form that performs loan payment or currency exchange calculations right on the client in response to user input. A multimedia weather forecast applet written in Java can be scripted by JavaScript to display appropriate images and sounds based on the current weather readings in a region. A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. A page might contain JavaScript scripts that run on both the client and the server. On the server, the scripts might dynamically compose and format HTML content based on user preferences stored in a relational database, and on the client, the scripts would glue together an assortment of Java applets and HTML form elements into a live interactive user interface for specifying a net-wide search for information.

> Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects, so the range of live online applications that dynamically present information to and interact with users over enterprise networks or the Internet is virtually unlimited. Netscape will support Java and JavaScript in client and server products as well as programming tools and applications to make this vision a reality.

> "Programmers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Java because it was designed from the ground up for the Internet. JavaScript is a natural fit, since it's also designed for the Internet and Unicode-based worldwide use," said Bill Joy, co-founder and vice president of research at Sun. "JavaScript will be the most effective method to connect HTML-based content to Java applets."

This was all implemented, and Java applets had full interoperability with JavaScript. Applets could call JavaScript functions, and JavaScript functions could call applet methods. Of course over time people gave up on Java applets and JavaScript became a good enough language to write real application logic directly in it. It's true that JavaScript now has virtually nothing to do with Java, but that wasn't the case initially, and the name has at least some logic behind it.

Just FYI, I was reliably informed that jag did java.util.Date as shipped in JDK 1.0. Ta!