Deno, a company offering a JavaScript runtime, filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to cancel Oracle’s trademark for JavaScript.
This writes SDTimes. Deno argues that the Java trademark was abandoned by its administrator and should be freely available to the large community of developers who use the language.
Ryan Dahl, co-founder of Deno and creator of Node.js, wrote in a blog post on Nov. 25 that the petition demonstrates that “Oracle has not offered significant products or services under the ‘JavaScript’ name for years.” He added that Oracle’s JET (Java Extension Toolkit) and GraalVM do not count as actual commercial use.
Under U.S. law, trademarks not used for three consecutive years are considered abandoned. Dahl wrote that Oracle’s “inactivity clearly meets this threshold.”
Discussion ongoing for some time
There have been several attempts and discussions in the past about separating Oracle and Java. This is a topic that comes up regularly in the tech community because of the way the tech giant has exercised control over Java since its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010.
Oracle firmly controls Java as custodian of the official Java Standard Edition (SE) and its associated Java Development Kit (JDK). This has led to concerns about the centralization of power.
With changes to Oracle’s licensing policy in 2019, many companies have switched to OpenJDK or other non-Oracle distributions of Java. This shows that there was a clear need to separate Oracle and Java.
Confusion in the Java community
Regarding the trademark, Dahl said the community is confused by Oracle’s non-use of the trademark. For example, developers have had to avoid using the term JavaScript in a community-organized series of conferences on the subject, which has therefore been called JSConf.
Dahl further suggested that the language specification could be known as the JavaScript specification, replacing the cumbersome name “ECMAScript-262 specification.” Also, the “Rust for JavaScript Developers” community would no longer have to fear legal threats over using the term.
Oracle remains silent
After Dahl, along with Brendan Eich, the creator of the specification, and many others in the JavaScript community wrote a letter to Oracle asking for the trademark to be released, he decided to formally petition the USPTO because of Oracle’s silence.
According to Dahl, Oracle has until Jan. 4 to respond to the petition. If the company does not respond, it will be declared in default and the trademark will be cancelled.