Recently Groupon announced a product with the same product name as GNOME. Groupon’s product is a tablet based point of sale “operating system for merchants to run their entire operation.” The GNOME community was shocked that Groupon would use our mark for a product so closely related to the GNOME desktop and technology. It was almost inconceivable to us that Groupon, with over $2.5 billion in annual revenue, a full legal team and a huge engineering staff would not have heard of the GNOME project, found our trademark registration using a casual search, or even found our website, but 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). To use the GNOME name for a proprietary software product that is antithetical to the fundamental ideas of the GNOME community, the free software community and the GNU project is outrageous. Please help us fight this huge company as they try to trade on our goodwill and hard earned reputation.
Groupon acting scummy. Say it ain’t so.
Update: Groupon has decided to abandon the trademark applications. Situation resolved!
https://www.groupon.com/blog/cities/gnome-update
For the record, the link that @analogue posted has the following message from Groupon:
(reposting it here, because the page itself is currently struggling under the load; I got several errors before I was finally able to load the page)
spudley99,
I wonder how much money it would actually take to come to an agreement? For us sitting on the sidelines, it’s easy to uphold principals that the name shouldn’t be sold or shared at any price. But for those involved in the real world, a large sum of money could go a long way towards helping many open source developers and projects.
How many here think GNOME should take a billion dollars for it’s trademark? Obviously the number is out of thin air, I merely chose it for the sake of argument to get an idea of where people stand.
They have just now updated that post to say that they will now abandon their trademark application for “Gnome” and choose a new name.
s/be/look like/
It’s too late, they obviously ARE an ass for doing this, this is damage control. I’m surprised at how blatantly they are infringing here. Maybe they figured they had enough lawyers and money to make the problem go away? It reminds me of apple’s disregard for other’s trademarks.
Another update:
Good decision. Took too long to make it.
Yes, they decided to abandon the tradermark. It will now be called KDE.
reduz,
Haha, that would be hilarious. Sounds like a joke Conan or Leno might use in their monologs if they had a tech audience. Maybe geeks should get their own late night show
After arguing with the KDE community, Groupon decided to abandon all their trademark applications for KDE and decided to rename their KDE POS tablet to Unity.
The following dispute over the Unity name is resolved once Canonical agrees to include a Groupon search lens in Unity next release. 😀
What a brilliant product name. Confusing to customers, impossible for search engines to find AND surrounded by an aura of negativity.
Its like naming your travel agency: Titanic.
Hilarious (+1)
It’s about time it died anyway!
Sadly I think GNOME will hit their target …
I’m guessing Groupon didn’t like all the systemd creep in Gnome lately.
Marketing departments as of recent years decided that stealing brands used by other broducts with relative brand awareness for theirs was a good idea.
Stuff such as
“Nexus”, “Occulus”, “Unity”
Only end up confusing the consumer. Hope this stupid trend ends soon.
Tried to donate some Bitcoin, and got the following error:
Seriously? Why not a simple QR code?