I'm really curious about Oracle's motivation for fighting this. What value do they see in continuing to hold a trademark they aren't really using, and no one associates with them anyway?
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill
It’s their asset. It came with their $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun. I know it’s popular to hate on Oracle, and it’s deserved in many cases, but any company in this situation would defend their IP. Obviously it has value or somebody wouldn’t be trying to cancel it.
To be clear, the trademark is their asset. Sun trademarked the name JavaScript in 1997, for reasons assumed to be related to Java, probably in anticipation of a use case that never arrived. This had nothing to do with the existing language JavaScript which was created in 1993, and had no relationship with Sun.
> Obviously it has value or somebody wouldn’t be trying to cancel it.
"Somebody" is trying to cancel it because Oracle have been blindly defending it, not because it has any business value to Oracle. The JavaScript language has precedence, and today it's sheer popularity and major role in open web standard means Oracle could not possibly benefit from using it for any business purpose due to the strong existing association. It's only practical purpose is to torment the JavaScript community and further cement Oracle's reputation as a litigious cancer of the technology world.
They blindly defend it because they are a mindless lawnmower that consumed it, not because they are the wiser and know it has value.