> Yet it is obviously the right move to trade a worthless trademark for brand marketing and goodwill.
Just to play devils advocate... I think Oracle has so little goodwill with devs (quite the opposite), that releasing the JS trademark probably won't even move the needle.
They don't make any money from devs anyway. They sell their stuff to the business people who then force it onto devs. When I worked in government, we had some Oracle DBs. They were bought without consulting anyone who worked on the tech teams.
A business still needs to hire people to work on Oracle db. At my company they have trouble hiring for it. They resort to shared service orgs to provide DBA services. That means one DBA per 10-100 application developers. It’s awful. We do anything to avoid oracle because we can’t get a DBA to help us. Even use hadoop hive for non hive use cases.
I guess my point is that these struggles eventually do reach the leaders and they choose something else. We moved off teradata because of shared service orgs so we'll probably leave this type of oracle at some point too. Either a completely self service option of oracle or an open source one.
For large corporations and gov organisations I can see how that could plausibly be true... for everything else, not so much. At smaller companies the hierarchy is not so rigid or deep, and people are not so siloed, they must work together more closely and feel each others pain.
I'm a dev at a such a small company, and in a position that I can make or highly influence such decisions. Oracle products will never be in our supply chain because of me - a dev.
Hear, hear! Of course, if you're at a smaller company I expect the Oracle sales reps will be off hunting bigger prey, so that likely helps keep it out of your stack also...
Just to play devils advocate... I think Oracle has so little goodwill with devs (quite the opposite), that releasing the JS trademark probably won't even move the needle.