Open letter asks Oracle to release the JavaScript trademark into the public doma...

Despite the fact that the JavaScript programming language is open source, the name is under a trademark and is copyright to Oracle, Inc. However, there is currently a push for this trademark to be released and made freely available to the developer community.

Letter to Oracle: “Please Release the JavaScript Trademark”

On September 3, 2022, Ryan Dahl—creator of Node.js and Deno—published an open letter to Oracle, Inc., requesting the release of the JavaScript trademark.

Because of a previously standing partnership between Sun Microsystems and Netscape, when Oracle acquired Sun in 2009, the company also gained the rights to the JavaScript trademark. According to Dahl’s open letter, Oracle does not produce any products for the JavaScript programming language and does not actively participate in the language’s development, nor any of its related engines. The trademark is in name only and potentially, would even be legally enforceable due to its lack of active usage.

Oracle’s only JavaScript product is JET—the Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit—and therefore, Dahl argues that the trademark offers no monetary advantage and should be released and made public domain.

Ryan Dahl writes:

“Nevertheless the trademark is a dark cloud looming over the world’s most popular programming language. Careful law abiding engineers bend over backwards to avoid its use - leading to confusing terms like ECMAScript. The best value Oracle could derive from the trademark would be from the goodwill it receives by granting it into the public domain.”

Oracle and copyright law

Oracle has a history of controversy surrounding copyright law and software. A US Supreme Court case, Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., was a multi-trial dispute regarding 11,000 lines of source code in a Java API. Oracle claimed that this code was illegally used in Google’s Android platform, and that the code legally belonged to Oracle America Inc. Google admitted to using the code in their mobile platform, however, Google considered the Java code to be within the four factors of fair use.

Ultimately, Oracle v. Google was ruled in favour of Google in a 6-2 decision by the United States Supreme Court. The verdict ruled that the Java API used in Android was considered fair use.

However, this legal case opened up the question of whether or not APIs were copyrightable and what fair use would be legally defined as for source code. Software developers, particularly those who depend on open source software, have taken an interest in the case, the factors used to determine fair use, and the future of copyright law. (The verdict regarding API copyrightability is still murky, as the original 2012 decision that APIs are uncopyrightable was appealed and reversed in 2014.)

All eyes on Oracle

Oracle has recently also gained media attention for an ongoing class action claim in the United States regarding users’ personal data. According to a complaint filed on August 19, 2022 in California, Oracle has been violating user privacy.

The report alleges that:

“In the course of functioning as a worldwide data broker, Oracle has created a network that tracks in real-time and records indefinitely the personal information of hundreds of millions of people. Oracle sells this detailed personal information to third parties, either directly, or through its “ID Graph” and other related products and services derived from this data.”

Taking such controversies into consideration, the current standing between Oracle and the JavaScript domain is, potentially, a cause for concern and faces some opposition. Public perception of Oracle is generally with a critical, negative lens.

Read the thread on Hacker News for commentary and opinions about the situation from the JavaScript and developer community about the open letter.