GNOME starts campaign to protect its trademarks

[Tobias Mueller <muelli cryptobitch de>]

GNOME has launched a campaign¹ to raise funds for protecting the GNOME trademarks.

Recently, Groupon launched Gnome², a tablet-based point of sale (POS) system that 
Groupon describes as a “platform” and an “operating system”.

The GNOME Foundation is concerned and sees their long-established mark for Free 
Software, GNOME, endangered. The GNOME Foundation asks for ideological and 
monetary support to cover the costs of opposing the marks Groupon applied to 
register, which were estimated to be around 80,000 USD.

“I cannot believe Groupon was not aware of GNOME, the Free Software desktop 
environment and application suite, when it chose the name. Especially as they 
claim to be ‘fueled by open source‘³,” said Tobias Mueller, one of the directors 
of the GNOME Foundation.

“We will not give up and fight their use of our name which we have established 
over the last 17 years to provide users all over the world with high quality 
Free Software solutions.”

“Millions of people who use GNU/Linux based systems use GNOME or GNOME-related 
technologies, such as GLib or GTK+. We must not let a billion-dollar-company 
take the well-established name of one of the biggest Free Software communities,” 
Tobias added. “If you want to help GNOME defend its trademark and promote Free 
Software, visit the campaign’s page¹, share the link, and let Groupon know that 
they behaved terribly”.

GNOME also made a press contact⁴ available for further questions or interviews.


1: http://www.gnome.org/groupon/ 
2: http://investor.groupon.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=848707 
3: https://engineering.groupon.com/2014/open-source/sharing-is-caring-open-source-at-groupon/ 
4: mailto:groupon gnome org