Good Morning! Big moves are happening in the JavaScript world as the community, led by Deno, challenges Oracle's trademark ownership in what could be a watershed moment for the ecosystem. Google's Developer Program is stepping up its game with a new premium tier that offers some serious cloud perks for $299 a year. Meanwhile, NVIDIA is pushing the boundaries of AI audio with Fugatto, their new model that can blend and transform sounds in ways we've never seen before.

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

JavaScript Community Challenges Oracle's Trademark Ownership

Context: Oracle has owned the JavaScript trademark since acquiring Sun Microsystems in 2009, despite having minimal involvement in the language's development or ecosystem. This ownership has led to various issues, including cease-and-desist letters to organizations simply using "JavaScript" in their names.

Deno Land, the company behind the Deno runtime, has filed a petition with the USPTO to cancel Oracle's JavaScript trademark. The petition, backed by JavaScript creator Brendan Eich and Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, follows an open letter signed by over 14,000 community members.

The petition rests on three key arguments:

• Genericization: "JavaScript" has become a generic term used by millions without Oracle's involvement

• Abandonment: Oracle hasn't meaningfully used the trademark in commerce since acquisition

• Fraudulent renewal: Oracle allegedly used Node.js screenshots (unaffiliated with Oracle) as evidence when renewing the trademark in 2019

Impact: If successful, this would free the JavaScript name from legal constraints, allowing conferences to use "JavaScript" instead of alternatives like "JSConf," and potentially enabling the ECMAScript specification to be officially renamed to JavaScript. The community hopes Oracle will let the cancellation proceed uncontested, but Deno is prepared to present extensive evidence if needed.

Oracle has until January 4, 2025, to respond. If they don't, the cancellation could proceed by default, potentially marking a significant shift in how the JavaScript ecosystem operates and brands itself.

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Google Developer Program Levels Up: Premium Tier Brings Cloud-Focused Perks

Context: Since its launch at I/O earlier this year, Google's Developer Program has attracted millions of developers with its standard free tier offering AI-powered documentation and development tools. Now, Google's taking it up a notch with a premium membership option.

For $299/year, the premium tier is packed with cloud-centric features that could be a game-changer for serious Google Cloud developers. Here's what you get:

• $500 in Google Cloud credits to experiment with services like Gemini Code Assist and Firebase

• A Google Cloud certification voucher (plus bonus $500 credits when you get certified)

• Unlimited access to 700+ hands-on labs and courses in Cloud Skills Boost

• 1:1 consultations with Google Cloud experts for technical guidance

• Access to the new Benefits Dashboard for managing your perks

Tech Take: What makes this interesting is how Google's positioning it as an evolution of their Cloud Innovators Plus program, but with broader scope across Google's dev ecosystem. The premium tier keeps all the standard benefits like AI assistance in documentation and Project IDX workspaces, while adding substantial cloud resources that could easily offset the annual cost. For developers heavily invested in the Google Cloud ecosystem or looking to level up their cloud skills, the included certification path and expert consultations make this a compelling offer.

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NVIDIA Unveils Revolutionary Audio AI Model with Multi-Modal Capabilities

NVIDIA has announced Fugatto (Foundational Generative Audio Transformer Opus 1), a 2.5B parameter transformer model that can handle any combination of text and audio inputs to generate or transform sound. The model leverages a technique called ComposableART, enabling it to combine instructions that were only seen separately during training - like applying both accent and emotion modifications simultaneously to speech.

Technical Details:

• Architecture: Built as a foundational generative transformer model

• Training Infrastructure: Utilized a bank of NVIDIA DGX systems with 32 H100 GPUs

• Key Features: Temporal interpolation for time-varying sounds, interpolation between instructions for fine-grained control, and emergent capabilities from multi-task learning

The model's training involved generating millions of blended audio samples and discovering new relationships in existing datasets. What sets Fugatto apart is its ability to create novel sound combinations it wasn't explicitly trained on, such as transitioning between disparate soundscapes - a capability that suggests impressive generalization from its training data.

While NVIDIA hasn't announced plans for public release, this development signals significant progress in unified audio AI models that can handle multiple modalities and tasks within a single architecture.

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