GNOME Foundation To Finally Challenge Groupon Over Trademarks

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Foundation To Finally Challenge Groupon Over Trademarks

Back in July I wrote about how there was a rather apparent trademark collision with Groupon's Gnome. Groupon launched a product earlier this year called Gnome that's a software solution, runs on tablets, and is meant to help merchants with point-of-sales software, etc. Of course, that directly collides with the well known GNOME desktop environment and GNOME Foundation...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgzNTg

[Chewi]

I missed the news in July so only came to hear of this today. I haven't used GNOME for 10 years but I pinged $5 across anyway because this just stinks.

[skx7]

Unbelievable! Groupon, known since their IPO for fraudulent accounting practices, is now blatantly violating the Gnome Foundation trademark. I really hope all opensource foundations will support them in this battle! And finally, who on earth is buying from this company??

[Paul-L]

I'll leave this, right here.

https://engineering.groupon.com/2014/misc/gnome-foundation-and-groupon-product-names/

Hopefully this means that GroupON will simply seek to change their product name.

[mufasa72]

From the groupon blog post:

We?ve been communicating with the Gnome Foundation for months to try to come to a mutually satisfactory resolution

Shouldn't this one be easy? GNOME is trademarked. The USPTO fucked up. You know you shouldn't use it, so don't. It appears that only under the pressure of legal action is groupon actually going to stop using the trademark. The whole

Our relationship with the open source community is more important to us than a product name

is just bull shit if it had to come to legal action to stop Groupon from infringing GNOME's right to the name.

And from the GNOME fundraising site for the legal action against Groupon (https://gnome.org/groupon/)

we nevertheless got in touch with them and asked them to pick another name. Not only did Groupon refuse, but it has now filed even more trademark applications (the full list of applications they filed can be found here, here and here)

We love open source at Groupon

Sure you do.

[Calinou]

The USPTO fucked up.

Daily business ad the USPTO and other ?IPR? offices.

is just bull shit if it had to come to legal action to stop Groupon from infringing GNOME's right to the name.

And we are paying for this, and this is a problem.

[Chewi]

Maybe I'm too nice but I don't doubt the sincerity behind that blog post. It came from the engineers and obviously they're not the ones in charge. The name was probably chosen well before they got wind of it. Where I work, I often name projects (when you start coding it up, you have to call it something) only to find the sales team has pitched them to clients under a totally different name. And we're a very small company.

[peppercats]

Daily business ad the USPTO and other ?IPR? offices.



And we are paying for this, and this is a problem.

If(more like when) GNOME wins the lawsuit, they'll likely sue for legal costs to cover whatever it cost for them to protect their copyright.

[Paul-L]

we nevertheless got in touch with them and asked them to pick another name. Not only did Groupon refuse, but it has now filed even more trademark applications (the full list of applications they filed can be found here, here and here)

We love open source at Groupon

Sure you do.

I think they mean this.

https://github.com/groupon

Problem is, this doesn't make it any valid, sure, publish a few (maybe) useful things for the open-source community to use, that doesn't make you to have any better look of stealing a name from a project/organization that has been around the double amount of time that they have.

[somini]

Maybe I'm too nice but I don't doubt the sincerity behind that blog post. It came from the engineers and obviously they're not the ones in charge. The name was probably chosen well before they got wind of it. Where I work, I often name projects (when you start coding it up, you have to call it something) only to find the sales team has pitched them to clients under a totally different name. And we're a very small company.

While GNOME is primarily known for being the default desktop of Linux distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Fedora, and Debian, GNOME also powers software that, like Groupon?s Gnome, is designed specifically for the retail industry. ?SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service solution for the retail industry is based on GNOME,?

Emphasis mine.