Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon • Hacker News Board

Re: Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

#11

Post by the_why_of_y » Tue, Nov 11, 2014, 12:34 PM UTC

voidz wrote: post #2

Ehm.. so.. GNOME wants our help now. But how did they behave when GNOME 3 was announced to not work without systemd? Or hey, anyone remember that discussion on a GNOME developers' mailing list, where they planned to take out theming support, because "it is going against the ubiquitous experience we envision GNOME 3 to be"? This smells fishy to me. (I said it more harshly, but realised that I went too far, sorry about…

Where exactly was it "announced" that GNOME 3 does "not work without systemd"?

GNOME 3 works on FreeBSD[1][2], you just don't get the robust and secure virtual terminal switching that only systemd's logind running on Linux can provide.

GTK+ 3 is now fully themeable with standard W3C CSS[3]. You may need to use Tweak Tool to change your theme, but is that really too much to ask for?

But please, don't let these facts stop you from cheering on large corporations as they trample all over open source projects.

[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/02/19/on-portability/ [2] http://blogs.gnome.org/desrt/2014/03/26/gnome-3-12-and-freeb... [3] https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkCssProvider.html

Re: Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

#12

Post by gaius » Tue, Nov 11, 2014, 12:34 PM UTC

clarkevans wrote: post #10

VMG wrote: post #5

I really don't know what happened over there at Groupon: http://gnome.groupon.com/#intro/index Did they truly not know? Did they just think the Gnome project wouldn't care? That they'll win the lawsuit?

Trademarks aren’t universal; they are divided into classifications e.g. market segments. Just because the name is the same, doesn't mean the PTO will think of them as being in the same space.

Groupon’s product is a tablet based point of sale “operating system for merchants to run their entire operation."

Could be close enough... This is no Vax vs Vax.

Re: Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

#13

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 11, 2014, 12:38 PM UTC

mahouse wrote: post #7

What's the point on trademarking something when later you need to pay $80,000 to defend it? The US... smh

[deleted]

Re: Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

#14

Post by jevgeni » Tue, Nov 11, 2014, 12:42 PM UTC

Groupon takes the pole position for the amount of douchebagery they dished out within such a short period of their existence.

Re: Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

#15

Post by jessaustin » Tue, Nov 11, 2014, 12:47 PM UTC

I had thought Groupon's core competence is scamming small businesses, not providing POS terminals for them? Do those two things go together?

Re: Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

#16

Post by vayarajesh » Tue, Nov 11, 2014, 12:48 PM UTC

How is it possible for Groupon to not know about GNOME? they probably have so many development machines running GNONE in their offices..

I find it hard to believe that none of their tech team has never heard of gnome..

Infact they should be grateful for GNONE for it being a huge part of linux operating systems and they must have surely used it during the course of groupon's existance

Re: Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

#17

Post by venomsnake » Tue, Nov 11, 2014, 12:51 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #12

clarkevans wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trademarks aren’t universal; they are divided into classifications e.g. market segments. Just because the name is the same, doesn't mean the PTO will think of them as being in the same space.

Groupon’s product is a tablet based point of sale “operating system for merchants to run their entire operation." Could be close enough... This is no Vax vs Vax.

Also for a lot of people the shell is the OS. So yeah. A big criteria about trademarks - customer confusion is plausible here.

Re: Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

#18

Post by venomsnake » Tue, Nov 11, 2014, 12:52 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #15

I had thought Groupon's core competence is scamming small businesses, not providing POS terminals for them? Do those two things go together?

This will provide bigger surface area for scamming and fleecing them.

Re: Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

#19

Post by gnurag » Tue, Nov 11, 2014, 1:01 PM UTC

Shame on you Groupon. Allow me to suggest an alternate name for your PoS tablet: iPad

Re: Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon

#20

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 11, 2014, 1:02 PM UTC

unwind wrote: post #3

voidz wrote: post #2

Ehm.. so.. GNOME wants our help now. But how did they behave when GNOME 3 was announced to not work without systemd? Or hey, anyone remember that discussion on a GNOME developers' mailing list, where they planned to take out theming support, because "it is going against the ubiquitous experience we envision GNOME 3 to be"? This smells fishy to me. (I said it more harshly, but realised that I went too far, sorry about…

Following the links to Groupon's Gnome product pages makes it pretty simple to see that the basic claim is quite clearly real. No idea where you go from "this open source project doesn't develop in the direction I expect/want" to "this open source project deserves to lose their brand".

[deleted]