This article makes for an interesting read. Here follow two early paragraphs for context:
Oracle controls the JavaScript trademark because in 2009 it acquired Sun Microsystems, which applied to trademark the name with the US Patent and Trademark Office back in 1995. The trademark was granted in 2000.
While the database giant does not use the name for any commercial products, its ownership of the trademark has led JavaScript-oriented organizations such as events biz JSConf to adopt branding that avoids the term. As the signatories to the letter observe, the world’s most popular programming language therefore can’t have a conference that mentions what it’s about.
Toward the end, the article mentions an initiative to legally pursue Oracle for trademark abandonment.
In one fell swoop they managed to gobble up quite a lot of FOSS projects, triggering quite a lot of forks…
R.I.P. Sun
Sun Solaris was my first *nix, and I have very strong memories of hanging out in the cluster of Sun machines as well as running a remote x window session from whatever overlocked Celeron win2k machine I had in my dorm at the time.