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!
Tbh I think we should just universally be ditching js for ts. I use them both every day and while it's nice to have such a flexible scripting language the amount the bend over for backwards compatibility and the glacial pace and gatekeeping of ecma International. Because of this all of the numerous flaws of the original design have been clutched onto and rigorously defended by so many righteous believers.
Microsoft lost that fight so badly long ago against Sun that Internet Explorer and Windows documentation for like a decade referred to the language as "JScript" (and also tried to make VBScript a viable alternative partly to avoid even accidentally using Sun's trademark) to the bemusement of everyone. Interesting to wonder if the web would have been a little better if Microsoft had won that trademark battle at the time or if Sun had donated the trademark to ECMA so that official standards didn't have to be named EcmaScript.
> [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"
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.
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.
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.
The likelihood of the JavaScript trademark bringing any real benefit to Oracle in the future is close to zero, but the legal costs of taking it to court are significant. For the sake of mere spite and mean-spiritedness they seem to be trying to waste the company's money.
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)
The legal system is fundamentally broken, globally.
Last time I tried to start a legal action to claim damages against a big company for a very clear-cut case full of obvious fraud and deception (with plenty of evidence and many witnesses). I couldn't find a single lawyer willing to take my case for a share of the proceeds. The defendant was sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in questionably-obtained cash and assets. To me, this is proof that the legal system is broken. It means the lawyers knew that the odds of winning were extremely low, regardless of the evidence.
I told them about the large amounts of money involved and told them my situation; many of them didn't even ask about what evidence I had. That's how unlikely it is to win a legal case for a non-corporate entity; lawyers won't even lift a finger about a case involving millions and literal fraud if the plaintiff doesn't have the right status, exposure or business connections.
If this is how they deal with the creator of Node.js with the support of Brendan Eich (who literally invented JavaScript), then imagine how they deal with the rest of us who aren't high-exposure individuals.
What's the point of even having a legal system if it only works for certain people?
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!
They do have more users than that, but from memory they typically distribute it in some other interesting way - i think there's a CLI that installs and manages it.
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!
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.
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.
It's their JS UI components library. Gets used in oracle apps. Very comprehensive in terms of covering all you need. Another comment opines on its technical soundness.
They did several wrong decisions, first they started building it with old libraries, e.g. JQuery, KnockoutJS, then they they should have opened their no code builder to the public. They are now in the process of porting it to Preact and opened VBCS, but it’s too late. From UI point of view, it is the most complete library
I'm sympathetic to the points being made but the argument that Oracle does not have its own JavaScript runtime does not hold.
An OracleBD is able to execute triggers written in JavaScript since quite some time.
I don't think the article outright claims Oracle has no JavaScript runtime, only that Oracle JET is no runtime, which is true. And since this is the evidence Oracle presented to keep the trademark, it's fair to point out that this is nonsense. But it's also true that if this goes to court, Oracle could present GraalJS (which is used in OracleDB) as evidence for their case.
Well, at least I can still install ublock origin on Edge, but I can't do that on Vanilla Chromium (yep, that manifest v3 thing is enabled by default for Chromium in Google's flavor)
sure ok, you can still use it in UWP webviews (but you can also use the chromium version). but that seems like a really insignificant application compared to the rest of the browsers being listed.
Netscape wanted to call their new language "JavaScript" to piggy-back off the popularity of Java. Sun Microsystems owned Java(tm), and allowed Netscape to use the name while retaining the trademark. Netscape was purchased by AOL and then terminated. Oracle purchased Sun and all things Java, including the JavaScript trademark. Sun and Oracle have never done anything significant in the JavaScript world, but retain the trademark because of the Java name.
Since literally no one associates JavaScript with Oracle, unless aware of the name history and company acquisition history, it isn't a valid identifier of the source of "JavaScript", and should be canceled or transferred to an organization like EcmaScript International.
Readit News
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!
They should wrest this from Oracle.
"Microsoft Edge: the browser that gave you <script> as no one else could."
Great phrase
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"
Yes, those are old by now, but it's still a blast from the past.
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.
Oracle has been making only lawsuits for a while.
Last time I tried to start a legal action to claim damages against a big company for a very clear-cut case full of obvious fraud and deception (with plenty of evidence and many witnesses). I couldn't find a single lawyer willing to take my case for a share of the proceeds. The defendant was sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in questionably-obtained cash and assets. To me, this is proof that the legal system is broken. It means the lawyers knew that the odds of winning were extremely low, regardless of the evidence.
I told them about the large amounts of money involved and told them my situation; many of them didn't even ask about what evidence I had. That's how unlikely it is to win a legal case for a non-corporate entity; lawyers won't even lift a finger about a case involving millions and literal fraud if the plaintiff doesn't have the right status, exposure or business connections.
If this is how they deal with the creator of Node.js with the support of Brendan Eich (who literally invented JavaScript), then imagine how they deal with the rest of us who aren't high-exposure individuals.
What's the point of even having a legal system if it only works for certain people?
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!
How about the Oracle Java Virtual Machine.
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.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/@oracle/ojet-clihttps://www.npmjs.com/package/@oracle/oraclejet
see https://blogs.oracle.com/java/post/multilingual-engine-execu...
> 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?
No. It's based on Chromium. It has quite a bit on functionally that's not available on Chrome or Chromium.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML
Since literally no one associates JavaScript with Oracle, unless aware of the name history and company acquisition history, it isn't a valid identifier of the source of "JavaScript", and should be canceled or transferred to an organization like EcmaScript International.