Oracle owns JavaScript!
If you’ve ever wondered why you don’t see the term “JavaScript” in company names, conferences, or official branding, the answer lies in something unexpected: Oracle owns the trademark to the name “JavaScript”. While this may sound strange for a language so universally known and used, it’s a reality that has legal implications and creates challenges for the JavaScript community.
In this blog post, we’ll explore why Oracle owns the trademark, what this means for developers, and why this legal framework exists in the first place.
To understand why Oracle holds the trademark for the name “JavaScript,” we need to go back to 2009, when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems was the original creator of the Java programming language, and they also held the rights to the name “JavaScript,” which was developed at Netscape by Brendan Eich in the mid-90s. Even though Java and JavaScript are very different, the naming similarity is part of this story.
With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle also inherited the legal rights to various trademarks, including “JavaScript.” However, Oracle doesn’t actively use the JavaScript trademark for any of its products. Still, they must enforce it to retain control of the name, even though JavaScript (as an implementation of ECMAScript) is widely used by millions of developers worldwide and powers the majority of web applications.
