Re: GNOME starts campaign to protect its trademarks

[Ekaterina Gerasimova <kittykat3756 gmail com>]

On 11/11/2014, Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com> wrote:
> Hi Fabiano,
>
>
> > > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
> >
> > I'd like to raise two suggestions here.
> > 1) I have the feeling that people would feel more welcome to donate if
> > they could see how much money was already donated for this cause/how
> > many people have already contributed. So, if Foundation could expose
> > this info would be awesome for attracting more donations.
>
> But what can Foundation do if the amount raised is less than this?
> > Does Foundation have goals/clear idea about how to proceed if we can
> > just raise 40K USD? Clear goals, even if Foundation doesn't raise the
> > necessary amount is, IMHO, also that would help for attracting more
> > donations.
>
> The ethics here are really interesting. Objectively, I think it seems
> advisable for GNOME to be tactical about revealing how much financial
> weight they are able to throw at this problem in case Groupon are
> advantaged by that information. An ideal situation is one where GNOME are
> able to get Groupon to back down so that any money raised can go back into
> the project itself, really.
>
> Maybe my first impressions are wrong but in this case I suspect that we
> ought to just trust GNOME to do what it believes is best for the project
> and just get behind them, encouraging others to do the same, especially
> since we'll find out the details at the end of the tax year anyway. In this
> case the publicity itself probably has just as much, if not more value than
> the money they may raise. Groupon won't really want the entire FLOSS
> community against them. It's bad for business.

The Foundation does have cash reserves which can be used to defend the
trademark in case the donations will not cover the legal fees, but the
Foundation has already received overwhelming support from the
community and the Foundation is now in a strong position to proceed
with the defence.

We will update the donation amount as we get the numbers in, but there
have been so many donations that it is taking some time to process
them. At last update, it was USD 21093.90.

> Magdalen