VOOZH about

URL: https://thenewstack.io/deno-petitions-to-cancel-oracles-javascript-trademark/

⇱ Deno Petitions to Cancel Oracle’s JavaScript Trademark - The New Stack


TNS
SUBSCRIBE
Join our community of software engineering leaders and aspirational developers. Always stay in-the-know by getting the most important news and exclusive content delivered fresh to your inbox to learn more about at-scale software development.
REQUIRED
It seems that you've previously unsubscribed from our newsletter in the past. Click the button below to open the re-subscribe form in a new tab. When you're done, simply close that tab and continue with this form to complete your subscription.
The New Stack does not sell your information or share it with unaffiliated third parties. By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Welcome and thank you for joining The New Stack community!
Please answer a few simple questions to help us deliver the news and resources you are interested in.
REQUIRED
REQUIRED
REQUIRED
REQUIRED
REQUIRED
Great to meet you!
Tell us a bit about your job so we can cover the topics you find most relevant.
REQUIRED
REQUIRED
REQUIRED
REQUIRED
REQUIRED
Welcome!

We’re so glad you’re here. You can expect all the best TNS content to arrive Monday through Friday to keep you on top of the news and at the top of your game.

What’s next?

Check your inbox for a confirmation email where you can adjust your preferences and even join additional groups.

Follow TNS on your favorite social media networks.

Become a TNS follower on LinkedIn.

Check out the latest featured and trending stories while you wait for your first TNS newsletter.

PREV
1 of 2
NEXT
VOXPOP
As a JavaScript developer, what non-React tools do you use most often?
Angular
0%
Astro
0%
Svelte
0%
Vue.js
0%
Other
0%
I only use React
0%
I don't use JavaScript
0%
Thanks for your opinion! Subscribe below to get the final results, published exclusively in our TNS Update newsletter:
NEW! Try Stackie AI
From clobbered drafts to real-time sync
Apr 14th 2026 10:00am, by David Moore
TypeScript 6.0 RC arrives as a bridge to a faster future
Mar 14th 2026 9:00am, by Darryl K. Taft
Mastra empowers web devs to build AI agents in TypeScript
Jan 28th 2026 11:00am, by Loraine Lawson
2024-11-30 09:00:02
Deno Petitions to Cancel Oracle’s JavaScript Trademark
Frontend Development / JavaScript / Programming Languages

Deno Petitions to Cancel Oracle’s JavaScript Trademark

In other developer news, find out why the Vite team called Vite 6 a major release and learn about Tailwind CSS version 4, beta 1.
Nov 30th, 2024 9:00am by Loraine Lawson
👁 Featued image for: Deno Petitions to Cancel Oracle’s JavaScript Trademark

Deno is petitioning the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to cancel Oracle’s trademark for JavaScript, Deno creator Ryan Dahl announced on Monday.

“This marks a pivotal step toward freeing “JavaScript” from legal entanglements and recognizing it as a shared public good,” wrote Dahl.

Deno is an open source runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly. Dahl is well known in the frontend community for his creation of Node.js. He pointed out that if the effort succeeds, the community could claim JavaScript, promoting it at conferences and as a specification, as opposed to the current “ECMAScript.”

The petition asserts that JavaScript is a generic, universal name for the programming language and Oracle neither controls nor has ever controlled the language’s specifications or usage. It also claims that Oracle submitted fraudulent evidence to the USPTO when it renewed the JavaScript trademark in 2019.

“This included screenshots of Node.js—a project founded by myself and entirely unrelated to Oracle,” Dahl wrote. “Presenting Node.js as evidence of Oracle’s ‘use in commerce’ violates the integrity of trademark law.”

Finally, Dahl claims that Oracle, which acquired the trademark through its 2009 purchase of Sun Microsystems, has effectively abandoned it through non-use.

“The petition demonstrates that Oracle has not offered significant products or services under the name “JavaScript” in years,” he said. “Obscure offerings like the JavaScript Extension Toolkit or GraalVM, do not constitute genuine use in commerce. U.S. law considers trademarks unused for three consecutive years as abandoned, and Oracle’s inaction clearly meets this threshold.”

Vite 6 Released

In other news, Vite 6 released Tuesday, with the Vite team calling it the “most significant major release since Vite 2.” A quick look at the GitHub change log shows why — it’s an extensive list of breaking changes, features, fixes and chores.

The team reported that adoption keeps growing — npm downloads per week jumped from 7.5 million to 17 million since the release of Vite 5. They also gave shoutouts to new frameworks that had joined the Vite ecosystem, which included TanStack Start, One and Ember.

Vite 6 supports Node.js 18, 20, and 22+, but Node.js 21 support has been dropped (Vite drops Node.js support for older versions after their end of life).

The team also wrote about its new Environment API, which is experimental and primarily aimed at framework authors.

“These new APIs will allow framework authors to offer a dev experience closer to production and for the Ecosystem to share new building blocks,” the blog post noted. “Nothing changes if you’re building a SPA; when you use Vite with a single client environment, everything works as before. And even for custom SSR apps, Vite 6 is backward compatible.”

There is a migration guide but the listed main changes to Vite 6 include:

Tailwind CSS Releases V4.0 Beta 1

Tailwind released version 4.0 Beta 1 late last week. About eight months ago, the Tailwind CSS team open-sourced it’s progress and this release comes on the heels of that, plus what Tailwind developer Adam Wathan described as “hundreds of hours of fixing bugs, soul-crushing backward compatibility work, and troubleshooting Windows CI failures later.”

The result, he writes, is an “all-new engine built for performance, and designed for the modern web.” It’s said to be 5 times faster on full builds, with incremental builds coming in at over 100 times faster and measured in microseconds.

There’s also a unified toolchain and CSS-first configuration. It’s designed for the modern web in that it’s “built on native cascade layers, wide-gamut colors, and including first-class support for modern CSS features like container queries, @starting-style, popovers, and more,” he wrote.

The team also published beta documentation to help developers get started.

TRENDING STORIES
Loraine Lawson is a veteran technology reporter who has covered technology issues from data integration to security for 25 years. Before joining The New Stack, she served as the editor of the banking technology site Bank Automation News. She has...
Read more from Loraine Lawson
SHARE THIS STORY
TRENDING STORIES
TNS owner Insight Partners is an investor in: Deno.
SHARE THIS STORY
TRENDING STORIES
TNS DAILY NEWSLETTER Receive a free roundup of the most recent TNS articles in your inbox each day.
The New Stack does not sell your information or share it with unaffiliated third parties. By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.