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.

Groupon Hijacks GNOME Trademark

The article I read is: Gnome Foundation accuses Groupon of trademark hijacking, pleads for help

In my "GNU/Linux" section of my Play Newsstand feed, this article was at the top (being the newest, if I assume that's how it works), and it immediately caught my attention; I was relatively exasperated after fishing reading the article. When I was trying to continue through the feeds like I normally do, I first saw two more articles about this before losing the ability to focus on anything else.

If you've read enough of my blog, you know well that I love GNOME - which I've been using since 2.x since Linux Mint 8 - so you know know you didn't before. For something like this, I'm seriously at a loss of words on the stupidity of Groupon. I seriously don't know what to say besides that I'm pretty outraged.

I suppose I can start with Groupon in general from what I know and have experienced...

I first learned about Groupon while working at my old job, since there'd be a few  people complaining that their Groupon car wash code didn't work, to which I told them that we weren't part of it, being ridiculed back with something similar to "You're a Circle K, you're supposed to take Groupon." Eventually, I learned it was actually the "actual" Circle K catty-corner from us that was part of the Groupon deal (the "actual" Circle Ks are the ones with Shell petroleum, the one I worked at sold Conoco petroleum and was only a franchise), so I was able to properly redirect the customers to the correct location so that their Groupon code would work.

I never really got into Groupon at all (never mind the experience with the customers who did), and never really understood it that much - I knew it was like a "coupon" but what exactly was the "group" part of it?

Well, I can say I'm glad I didn't really get into it, since they're pulling crap like this now, and I definitely never will now, because I don't support anything that goes against what I believe.

If I had the money to, I would certainly donate what I'm able, to help the Gnome Foundation fight this battle, but I have to keep what I have left, so that I'm able to find employment.

I won't beg you to donate or see things my way, but if you believe in the basic ideas of GNU Project, please do what you can to help the Gnome Foundation to win this battle.