Groupon ignores 17 years of open source history, tries to trademark Gnome

Groupons getting into the point-of-sale game with a tablet-based system to rival Square. Theyre calling it Gnome, and they want to trademark the name which doesnt sit well with the GNOME project.

Grab a dictionary (or hit up Google), and its easy enough to see why Groupon feels like Gnome is a good name for their point-of-sale terminal. In the fantasy world, gnomes sometimes look after epic underground piles of treasure. Its also used as a label for experts in banking monetary matters (the gnomes of Zurich).

Still, for Groupon to ignore the 17-year history of the GNOME project and the highly popular desktop environment it produces is a slap in the face for supporters of free and open source software. Theyre also ignoring the fact that the project already has a trademark on GNOME, and have had it for the past eight years.

And theres still one more thing theyre ignoring: this blog post on their very own website. Its titled Sharing is Caring, and its all about how much Groupon loves open source and how important and amazing the people who contribute to open source software are. In their defense, that post was published a whole month ago, so its possible that they just forgot about how much they cared about the open source movement over the past four weeks.

GNOME supporters are not at all pleased by Groupons move. We are outraged that Groupon would attempt to insinuate that its proprietary software and products have anything to do with the GNOME community, said Andrew Lee of Private Internet Access.

Groupon has countered with a new blog post. In it, they claim that theyve been communicating with the GNOME for months to find a mutually satisfactory resolution, adding that theyll gladly look for another name if they cant work things out because, well, they love open source.

Now, if thats actually true, you wouldnt think that GNOME would need to go out looking for donations for a legal defense fund. No, the fact that theyre doing just that makes it seem as though mutually satisfactory really means Groupon will take the Gnome trademark and GNOME can slink off into a corner and figure out another way to brand their 17-year free software legacy.

GNOME figures theyll need around $80,000 to formally oppose Groupons first set of ten trademark applications. The good news is that if their legal team doesnt need all the money itll go toward furthering the GNOME project. Head on over and kick in a few bucks if you can.

Update: That was over in a hurry. After lengthy discussions with the open source community today (which no doubt involved a lot of shouting and fist shaking), Groupon decided to back down. Theyre officially looking for a new name and no, its not going to be Electronic Monetary And Coupon System or something like that.

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Groupon ignores 17 years of open source history, tries to trademark Gnome