Groupon Removes Tradmark Filings

The article I read is: Groupon Abandons “Gnome” Trademark Filings!

As the article itself said, that was a quick response; it's nice that things finally smoothed out correctly. Besides that the Gnome Foundation now has some $22,000 (USD), there's not really much I have to say about it.

I did read a very small snippet of the Twitter posts on Trek Glowacki's page (I guess that's what it's called?), and some of them I'm not sure how to feel.

naw, @grayj_ @jedgar we're going with Virtual Inventory Manager (VIM). Everyone loves it.
— Trek Glowacki (@trek) November 11, 2014

I have a slight problem with this, as there's the Vi Improved (VIM) text editor. Technically, there's no infringement, since VIM in Groupon's case is an acronym for "Virtual Inventory Manager" as previously stated, and VIM in the application sense is a contraction of Vi Improved. The only reason why I have a slight problem with it is that Groupon was already walking on broken glass with GNOME and this just makes it seem like they haven't learned their lesson that well. But as I said, there's no real trademark infringement since (if I remember correctly) trademarks are based off of the "full name" and not the acronym.

@trek @grayj_ @jedgar Not as good as the Extended Merchant Access and Control System
— Jason Yanowitz (@yanowitz) November 11, 2014

Once I put this one together, I got a good laugh out of it.

@williampietri the original naming mixup was an honest mistake. Marketers are not linux gurus.
— Trek Glowacki (@trek) November 11, 2014

This is the one I have a hard time believing. As far as I'm concerned, marketers are supposed to research thoroughly to make sure there's no copyright and/or trademark infringements. You don't need to be a Linux guru to find that GNOME is already a registered trademark - what I mean is a simple search in Google for "gnome" [sic] yields the GNOME homepage with the first result. I might not have any degrees in marketing, but for f*k's sake, keep it simple and use a search engine - it's not that hard!

Anyway, seems like the posts that follow is just some weird argument thing between Trek and some other guy, so I didn't care enough to scroll down more than that.

It would've been nicer if Groupon was a bit more responsive initially instead of making a bad move to file the trademarks, but at the least the matter is now resolved.