Gnome Foundation and Groupon product names | Hacker News Reader

Gnome Foundation and Groupon product names

engineering.groupon.com

38 pointssigvef14 comments

Why didn't they just change the name when Gnome told them not to use it? I thought Groupon was a good company. This is just pure evil.

I thought Groupon was a good company.

Where would you have gotten that idea? Certainly not from anything Groupon has ever done.

The good that came out of this is that GNOME now have tons of money from donations that they're going to put to use improving the GNOME desktop. Woo!

https://twitter.com/Groupon/status/532268238621921280

"We have decided to abandon our pending trademark applications for #Gnome. Read more: http://gr.pn/gnomeupdate #defendGNOME"

Was the naming an honest mistake or deliberate marketing move? :)

I've heard absolutely nothing about Groupon recently (they are selling a POS now?!) until this happened.

Probably an honest mistake, though. Gnome seems an odd choice for a deliberate trademark conflict.

I don't know who Sri Viswanath is, but I wonder if he understands the implications of "we’ll be glad to look for another name."

This has to have been run by Groupon legal, right?

>This has to have been run by Groupon legal, right?

Yep. And that portion was in bold. Groupon has officially backed down.

Not necessarily, however, if they did, I wonder if it was due to the fact that their legal team advised to do it or they backed down due to community/Internet pressure.

Yes, they did:

"Groupon has agreed to change its product name" http://www.gnome.org/news/2014/11/groupon-has-agreed-to-chan...

The legal team of course reviews product names pre-launch. This about-face was due to community/Internet pressure.

Sri is the SVP of engineering.

They should call their product git for "groupon it"

Good for Groupon...it's the right thing to do.

What is the name in question?

Groupon was trying to trademark 'Gnome' which was that name for their POS system.

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