That's why there's ECMAScript - the official name of the spec ... nothing new.
JavaScript is a trademark owned by Oracle
61–70 of 85 posts
Re: JavaScript is a trademark owned by Oracle
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really understand what remains unclear. The cited section explains that when Java got put into the browser, executives of both companies got together and decided that it would be good PR to rename LiveScript into JavaScript. As Java was a trademark by Sun, they obviously had to register JavaSript as well (if they hadn't already done so - I did not look up the timeline, but it's not really relevant to the argu…
But Sun and Oracle have not demanded other users of Javascript obtain licenses.
True, but for a long time the only noteworthy "other user" was Microsoft and they kept calling it JScript for years even after they adopted the standard.
I'm not sure what exactly happened, but at some time after or during the lifetime of IE9 they stopped referring to their dialect of ECMAScript as "JScript" and began calling it "JavaScript". The most recent stuff I can find about JScript is about JScript.NET, which seems to be discontinued.
There's this issue filed on the Mozilla project back in 2000 that addresses this problem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44841
As Google, Apple and Microsoft are openly using the JavaScript trademark (without marking it as a trademark) these days, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that it's okay to use the term "JavaScript" to refer to an ECMAScript implementation that is compatible with the original JavaScript language developed by Netscape. This would probably preclude Adobe's ActionScript and other "enhanced" flavours of ES (e.g. JSX? I've never seen Facebook refer to JSX as "JavaScript " in a way that would imply JSX is simply JavaScript).
Re: JavaScript is a trademark owned by Oracle
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
JS is arguably a different trademark entirely from JavaScript.
I wondered about that. I would prefer it if we all started calling it JS (as many do), and pretended it stood for -- the language. Though I suppose we'd keep having to say "the language formerly known as JavaScript" in many contexts. I also like the JS logo and its variations. I'm assuming Oracle could lay no claim to that . . .
A lot of JS developers call it "ECMAScript" these days. A lot more frequently than, say, ten years ago.
Mostly this is because we no longer care about JavaScript version numbers (I facepalmed when I saw a dropdown in JetBrains' WebStorm IDE that offered various "JavaScript 1.x" options as the language environment). Instead we only care about "ES 3", "ES 5" (i.e. ECMAScript 5.1) and "ES 6" (which frequently also refers to ES 7 and beyond). At the same time I see less and less references to "Harmony", probably because the spec that came out of it is now openly using a real version number.
Of course the irony here is that what people often think of as "JS" these days is not actually Mozilla's JavaScript implementation but that of V8, as used in Chrome, node.js and other places (probably because V8 is relatively painless to embed).
Re: JavaScript is a trademark owned by Oracle
#64Wikipedia says: "Today, 'JavaScript' is a trademark of Oracle Corporation. It is used under license for technology invented and implemented by Netscape Communications and current entities such as the Mozilla Foundation." [1] It's one of a long list of Java-related trademarks originally registered by Sun: https://web.archive.org/web/20100528154600/http://www.sun.co... Maybe Sun originally intended it to be the name of…
According to Crockford[0], Netscape called it LiveScript, originally. In their attempt to 'destroy Microsoft', they teamed up with Sun. One of Sun's original goals with Java was making it the client-side scripting language for the browser. However, Netscape had LiveScript. Apparently the negotiations almost broke down over this point. In an enlightened moment, (probably) Marc Andreessen proposed renaming LiveScript t…
I was told by Robert Mathis that the name ECMAScript was picked as a draft name because they were unable to focus on standardizing the language due to all the fighting about the name. They figured the name was so awful that they would have to go back and change it before they finished the standard. Then they never got back around to changing it.
Re: JavaScript is a trademark owned by Oracle
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't try to have a sense of humor on HN threads. You'll get modded into oblivion and have your joke disassembled and laid bare in an attempt to show how "unfunny" it might be. HN is serious business for serious people. Seriously.
Every word you said is completely accurate, and yet you had me laughing out loud; been a while since I have.
And me getting downvoted just kinda proves that.
Re: JavaScript is a trademark owned by Oracle
#66Nothing to see here, everyone calls it ECMAScript.
I've been programming JavaScript professionally for ten years and have interacted with thousands of JavaScript developers online and offline. I have never once heard anyone call the language ECMAScript except when they were specifically referring to the ECMA-262 specification.
Edit: After writing that I thought back, and now I do remember one time when somebody called the language ECMAScript when they weren't referring to the ECMA standard. I think this was the exception that proves the rule!
Re: JavaScript is a trademark owned by Oracle
#67This shouldn't be news to anyone who's old enough to remember the internet in the 90's. Back then Microsoft named their EMCAScript implementation "JScript" to avoid problems with Sun's trademark (I'm sure everyone on here is already aware that Oracle bought Sun a few years back). However I don't think this trademark is worth anything to Oracle any longer. Trademarks need to be defended or they're lost. This is why Wo…
Let's be careful with terminology here. I'm (also) not an IP lawyer, but as I understand it your use of the term 'public domain' here is inappropriate.
If you're arguing that JavaScript has become genericized - on the basis, presumably, that there are multiple institutions making available various implementations of JavaScript without acknowledging or licensing Oracle's trademark - I'm not sure that's correct, and typically that would only be settled in a legal case. Certainly, Google, for example, publishes V8 and describes it as a "JavaScript Engine" - and makes no trademark acknowledgement toward Oracle that I can see; if Oracle wanted to they could probably attempt to enforce their trademark rights there. Mozilla, who distribute SpiderMonkey as a "JavaScript Engine", acknowledge the trademark (though they still attribute it to Sun). Oracle's failure to continually distribute any product which makes use of their trademark might count against them, but if they wished to argue that Mozilla has continually exercised Netscape's exclusive right to use the trademark, they might be able to get a sympathetic judge to rule Google out of order for claiming V8 is 'JavaScript'. Without a legal ruling, the situation's not clearcut.
Re: JavaScript is a trademark owned by Oracle
#68Unity3d gets around this by calling their adaptation UnityScript.
Unity is actually pretty inconsistent about their naming. In some parts of their docs they call it UnityScript:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/CreatingAndUsingScripts.html
In other places they call it JavaScript:
http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/
And in the Unity Editor when you use the Add Component / New Script, they call it "Java Script"!
Everyone would be better served if Unity would call it UnityScript consistently, since as you mentioned, their language isn't JavaScript but is a fairly loose adaptation of it. It's more of a JavaScript-like language than real JavaScript.
Re: JavaScript is a trademark owned by Oracle
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's explains how LiveScript became Javascript but it doesn't answer the more interesting question: how did Netscape end up using a Sun trademark?
As I understand it from Crockford's retelling and what I've read on the web and heard in podcasts, Sun was concerned that LiveScript could be seen as a competitor to Java if both were present in the browser. Netscape wanted Java but wasn't willing to kill off their scripting language, so they agreed to name it JavaScript to make it sound like the two are related (and JS being "merely" a scripting language, people wou…
> Considering the original JS already contained the syntax Crockford would eventually define as JSON, you could say they managed to create not one but two languages at once.
No, the original version of JavaScript did not include object literals and array literals - the two foundations of JSON.
Object and array literals were introduced in JavaScript 1.2:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/New_...
This is why old-school JavaScript programming had so much code like this:
var obj = new Object;
obj.prop = 'value';
var ary = new Array;
ary[0] = 'first';
ary[1] = 'second';Re: JavaScript is a trademark owned by Oracle
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you a lawyer?
You don't need to be a lawyer to understand trademark law. But if you want to dismiss my point then there's plenty of case studies around; pick a few and investigate things yourself. I think you'll end up coming to the same conclusion as myself though.
Agreed that you don't need to be an attorney to understand trademark law. I work with some of the best in the business, and they think my understanding is nearly as good as theirs.