Betanews, a kind of semi-offical MS online press agency puts it with spin butter:
The two companies each have their own respective versions of the common programming language that is used across the web: Mozilla backs ECMAScript, while Microsoft pushes its own JScript1. … [Microsoft's Chris] Wilson started the tiff by suggesting that the next version of ECMAScript, version 4, may be too much of a change to the language itself to continue it as "JavaScript." Instead, he suggested that a completely new language be developed, because so much of the structure of the language would be changed.
Brendan Eich, the father of Javascript, wrote an "open letter"(!).
Chris,
You seem to be repeating falsehoods in blogs since the Proposed ECMAScript 4th Edition Language Overview was published, claiming dissenters including Microsoft were ignored by me, or "shouted down" by the majority, in the ECMAScript standardization group.2
Assuming you didn't know better, and someone was misinforming you, you (along with everyone reading this letter) know better now. So I'll expect to see no more of these lies spread by you.
Everything that has been done to advance JavaScript to the proposed ECMAScript 4th Edition (ES4) in Ecma TC39-TG1 has been in the open for well over a year, first via the es4-discuss mailing list (complete archive) and exports of our group's wiki, along with public talks I've given. Then by ecmascript.org hosting the reference implementation for ES4 as proposed, along with our public trac database. And finally by the whole wiki being fully opened up and hosted live — including Microsoft's "ES3.1" proposals.
These ES3.1 proposals came suddenly in March after years of passive participation by Microsoft, while the rest of the group worked on ES4. They have not been touched since April. They weren't published via wiki export at that time, by agreement among all parties in TG1 including Microsoft and Doug Crockford. For one thing, they were (and still are) extremely rough and incomplete, with unanswered comments. …
…, there has been no secrecy on the part of the majority of TG1, other than the secrecy requested by Microsoft and required by Ecma. Rather the opposite: Doug Crockford and Microsoft's reps would depart for private meetings, in the middle of the March, April, and especially the May TG1 face-to-face meetings.
My TG1 Convenor's Report, dated 4 May 2007, to Ecma TC39 (chaired by Jim Miller of Microsoft) is available to Ecma members at the Ecma members website. In it, I informed our parent TC39 committee that "[a] sub-group of TG1 is investigating possibly standardizing a smaller, compatible language, but this proposal has not yet been adopted." Since then, the sub-group has failed to present a coherent proposal — JScript informative documents are not proposals — and my next report to Ecma will have to say so plainly.