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GNOME Project Seeks Donations For Trademark Battle With Groupon
Drinking Bleach writes Groupon has released a tablet-based point of sale system called Gnome, despite the well-known desktop environment's existence and trademark status. This is also not without Groupon's internal knowledge of the GNOME project; they were contacted about the infringement and flatly refused to change the name of their own product, in addition to filing many new trademark applications for theirs. The GNOME project is seeking donations to help them in a legal battle against these trademark applications, and to get Groupon to stop using their name. They are seeking at least $80,000 to challenge a first set of ten trademark applications from Groupon, out of 28 applications that have been filed.
...called Groupon
Groupon Window System will take the best of windowing system technologies, mix it all up in a big bit bucket, and then start a flamewar followed by a schism. Just like all of the others.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
How would this be infringement? GNOME's trademark lists only the following goods and services:
Downloadable computer software tools and libraries used for the development of other software applications; downloadable computer software development tools; downloadable computer software for creating and managing a computer desktop; downloadable computer software for use as a graphical user interface; downloadable computer software for word processing, database management, and use as a spreadsheet
None of which this tablet system falls under other since this isn't "downloadable computer software". And:
Computer software development; computer software design; computer programming for others; technical consulting services in the field of computer software; licensing of intellectual property
Nor this.
I know this will not be popular of me to say, but this looks like IP trolling.
Some peple think that Gnome 3 is a fuming POS and say that Gnome 2 was way better tha the newer versions.
Gnome is certainly a PoS.
GNOME (the desktop environment) has been used as the point-of-sale operating system on cash registers at Lowe's Home Improvement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowe%27s) since the early 2000's. You can still walk around their stores and see Gnome 1.x with Enlightenment as its window manager on their _cash registers_ in 2014. That alone should be grounds for the GNOME Project's case.
Originally GNU Network Object Model Environment, but I think this has been deemphasized since at least 2.0.
Any way, it shouldn't be a problem; they could just use a translation of the word 'Gnome' - for example, in Swedish: Nissan. Problem solved.
How does that make sense? The risk of brand theft is higher with a more widely recognized product. If I introduce Coca Cola branded headphones (to name one of the few things Coca Cola doesn't stick their name on yet AFAIK), my sales would be boosted by the brand name association Coca Cola built, not the merits of my product. That's why trademark protections exist; to avoid borrowing/stealing/damaging (if the product sucks) other companies' reputations unfairly.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Hear hear. If one of the biggest and best known names in the FOSS world can't defend themselves from something so blatant it just encourages other big corporations from abusing smaller groups.
Red hat, we're looking at you to step up here.
The Systemd and GNOME3 toxic manouvers are irrelevant.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.