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It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

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Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#311

Post by anematode »

levkk wrote: post #268
StableAlkyne wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less the fact that someone owns JS's trademark, and more that it's specifically Oracle (they got it when they bought Sun). Oracle is an incredibly litigious company. Their awful reputation in this respect means that the JS ecosystem can never be sure they won't swoop in and attempt to demand rent someday. This is made worse by the army of lawyers they employ; even if they're completely in the wrong, whatever pro…

That's why courts don't take hypothetical cases. Someone has to be injured to demonstrate actual harm. Are there any examples of Oracle using their JavaScript trademark to sue anyone? If they did, that petition would have merit. Unless Demo was, this feels like a marketing project. And it's working, too, so kudos.

It's the specter of a lawsuit that's the problem.

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#312

Post by rdtsc »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #181
alberth wrote: post #177

Silly question: how are people negatively impacted by the trademark of "JavaScript"? Because in practice, isn't this a bit like "Kleenex" - where everyone knows you mean "tissue" (EMCAScript).

It's less the fact that someone owns JS's trademark, and more that it's specifically Oracle (they got it when they bought Sun). Oracle is an incredibly litigious company. Their awful reputation in this respect means that the JS ecosystem can never be sure they won't swoop in and attempt to demand rent someday. This is made worse by the army of lawyers they employ; even if they're completely in the wrong, whatever pro…

> Oracle is an incredibly litigious company. Their awful reputation in this respect means that the JS ecosystem can never be sure they won't swoop in and attempt to demand rent someday. This is made worse by the army of lawyers they employ; even if they're completely in the wrong, whatever project they go after probably won't be able to afford a defense.

That is why on one level I am surprised by the petition. They are talking to a supercharged litigation monster and are asking it "Dear Oracle, ... We urge you to release the mark into the public domain". You know what a litigation happy behemoth does in that case? It goes asks some AI to write a "Javascript: as She Is Spoke" junk book on Amazon just so they can hang on to the trademark. Before they didn't care but now that someone pointed it out, they'll go out of their way to assert their usage of it.

On the other hand, maybe someone there cares about their image and would be happy to improve it in the tech community's eyes...

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#313

Post by anematode »

morshu9001 wrote: post #291
wiseowise wrote: post #87

1) Put JS in maintenance mode, don’t add any language features, only runtime 2) TS becomes the official mainline, whoever doesn’t like types can just keep writing as they did before, because valid JS is valid TS Problem solved, it’s not that difficult.

Valid JS is often not valid TS. Any nontrivial amount of JS copied into TS will generally not work without tweaks. When people say TS is a superset of JS, it's just some academic definition of syntax supersets that isn't practically true. Non-exhaustive examples: let foo = 2 foo = "foo" // TS disallows type change let bar = {} bar.baz = 2 // TS disallows adding property

Even syntactically, TS is not a superset of JS: https://anemato.de/blog/js-to-ts

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#316

Post by wongarsu »

levkk wrote: post #268
StableAlkyne wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less the fact that someone owns JS's trademark, and more that it's specifically Oracle (they got it when they bought Sun). Oracle is an incredibly litigious company. Their awful reputation in this respect means that the JS ecosystem can never be sure they won't swoop in and attempt to demand rent someday. This is made worse by the army of lawyers they employ; even if they're completely in the wrong, whatever pro…

That's why courts don't take hypothetical cases. Someone has to be injured to demonstrate actual harm. Are there any examples of Oracle using their JavaScript trademark to sue anyone? If they did, that petition would have merit. Unless Demo was, this feels like a marketing project. And it's working, too, so kudos.

Trademark law is kind of about hypotheticals though. The purpose of a trademark is to prevent theoretical damages from potential confusion, neither of which you ever have to show to be real

In this case the trademark existing and belonging to Oracle is creating more confusion than no trademark existing, so deleting it is morally right. And because Oracle isn't actually enforcing it it is also legally right

Imho this is just the prelude to get better press. "We filed a petition to delete the JavaScript trademark" doesn't sound nearly as good as "We collected 100k signatures for a letter to Oracle and only got silence, now we formally petition the USPTO". It's also a great opportunity to find pro-bono legal council or someone who would help fund the petition

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#317

Post by jjkaczor »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #212
giancarlostoro wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am going to sound crazy, but, if Microsoft would free up TypeScript and every browser added native TypeScript features to JavaScript… and then we all just started calling it TypeScript. Maybe? Then you would see native ts files. Oracle will never give up JS. The funny thing is the number of people who confuse Java and JS.

> The funny thing is the number of people who confuse Java and JS. Is it? My experience in the past decade is that there are more memes about people who confuse the 2 than people that confuse the 2.

Heh - it depends on the "Project Damagers" you have to work with...

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#319

Post by ChuckMcM »

Random nerd note: The history is slightly wrong. Netscape had their own "interactive script" language at the time Sun started talking about Java and somehow got the front page of the Mercury news when they announced it in March of 1995. At the Third International World Wide Web Conference in Darmstadt Germany everyone was talking about it and I was roped into giving a session on it during lunch break (which then had to be stopped because no one was going to the keynote by SGI :-)). Everyone one there was excited and saying "forget everything, this is the future." So, Netscape wanted to incorporate it into Netscape Navigator (their browser) but they had a small problem which was that this was kind of a competitor to their own scripting language. They wanted to call it JavaScript to ride the coattails of the Java excitement and Sun legal only agreed to let them do that if they would promise to ship Java in their browser when it hit 1.0 (which it did in September of that year).

So Netscape got visibility for their language, Sun got the #1 browser to ship their language and they had leverage over Microsoft to extortionately license it for Internet Explorer. There were debates among the Java team about whether or not this was a "good" thing or not, I mean for Sun sure, but the confusion between what was "Java" was not. The politics won of course, and when they refused to let the standards organization use the name "JavaScript" the term ECMAScript was created.

So there's that. But how we got here isn't particularly germane to the argument that yes, we should all be able to call it the same thing.

Re: It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

#320

Post by ddtaylor »

morshu9001 wrote: post #291
wiseowise wrote: post #87

1) Put JS in maintenance mode, don’t add any language features, only runtime 2) TS becomes the official mainline, whoever doesn’t like types can just keep writing as they did before, because valid JS is valid TS Problem solved, it’s not that difficult.

Valid JS is often not valid TS. Any nontrivial amount of JS copied into TS will generally not work without tweaks. When people say TS is a superset of JS, it's just some academic definition of syntax supersets that isn't practically true. Non-exhaustive examples: let foo = 2 foo = "foo" // TS disallows type change let bar = {} bar.baz = 2 // TS disallows adding property

The amount of weird TS I see that attempts to keep the JS style of code while getting the compiler to stop being mad is strange. I will see hundreds of line of type inference work, when they could have just made an actual type.
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