Random nerd note: The history is slightly wrong. Netscape had their own "interactive script" language at the time Sun started talking about Java and somehow got the front page of the Mercury news when they announced it in March of 1995. At the Third International World Wide Web Conference in Darmstadt Germany everyone was talking about it and I was roped into giving a session on it during lunch break (which then had to be stopped because no one was going to the keynote by SGI :-)). Everyone one there was excited and saying "forget everything, this is the future." So, Netscape wanted to incorporate it into Netscape Navigator (their browser) but they had a small problem which was that this was kind of a competitor to their own scripting language. They wanted to call it JavaScript to ride the coattails of the Java excitement and Sun legal only agreed to let them do that if they would promise to ship Java in their browser when it hit 1.0 (which it did in September of that year).
So Netscape got visibility for their language, Sun got the #1 browser to ship their language and they had leverage over Microsoft to extortionately license it for Internet Explorer. There were debates among the Java team about whether or not this was a "good" thing or not, I mean for Sun sure, but the confusion between what was "Java" was not. The politics won of course, and when they refused to let the standards organization use the name "JavaScript" the term ECMAScript was created.
So there's that. But how we got here isn't particularly germane to the argument that yes, we should all be able to call it the same thing.
I was one of the original developers of Java at Sun. Here's a picture of most of us at the time : http://mcmanis.com/chuck/original_java_team.html (this was originally in the HotJava distribution Sun gave out when the source was released.)
I was doing security, networking, crypto, and a bit of Solaris support along with others. Basically I was a 'systems' guy vs a 'language' guy like James, Arthur and Richard. We all participated in the integration with Navigator and had weekly meetings with Netscape while we were doing that.
So Netscape got visibility for their language, Sun got the #1 browser to ship their language and they had leverage over Microsoft to extortionately license it for Internet Explorer. There were debates among the Java team about whether or not this was a "good" thing or not, I mean for Sun sure, but the confusion between what was "Java" was not. The politics won of course, and when they refused to let the standards organization use the name "JavaScript" the term ECMAScript was created.
So there's that. But how we got here isn't particularly germane to the argument that yes, we should all be able to call it the same thing.