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 much this! About 20 years ago, when I only started dealing with JS, I couldn’t grasp that pathetic name. Why even have Java in there?
Personally, I so much hate these so much weird nerdy stupid names. Gimp, anyone? These recursive acronyms like GNU, does somebody actually think that’s funny?
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.