Ryan Dahl writing on the Deno blog:
On November 22, 2024, Deno formally filed a petition with the USPTO to cancel Oracle’s trademark for “JavaScript.” This marks a pivotal step toward freeing “JavaScript” from legal entanglements and recognizing it as a shared public good.
If successful, the petition will eliminate barriers that have stifled community use of the name. Conferences could reclaim titles like “JavaScript Conference” instead of settling for “JSConf.” The language’s specification could finally drop the cumbersome “ECMAScript” moniker and be known simply as the “JavaScript Specification.” Communities like “Rust for JavaScript Developers” would no longer fear legal threats over their use of the term.
It seems that it’s not widely known that Oracle own the JavaScript trademark. It’s something that they inherited from Sun, which licensed the name to Netscape.
To me it’s obvious that Oracle hasn’t been using the trademark, but they have a lot of lawyers and deep pockets. Good luck to the Deno folks, it would be nice to free the name from ambiguity.