A battle over product name broke out between Groupon and GNOME

On May 19, 2014, GROUPON (groupup), which operates a joint purchase type coupon site, has developed a tablet-based platform for retailers "GnomeWe announced. However, however, the name "Gnome" is the name used in desktop environment such as Linux and FedoraGNOME"The difference between capital letters and small letters is exactly the same, and since Groupup tried to register a name as a trademark, a big riot took place around the product name.

Groupon Launches Gnome ™ - A Tablet Solution That Helps Merchants Run Their Business and Connect with Customers (NASDAQ: GRPN)
http://investor.groupon.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=848707

Help the GNOME Foundation defend the GNOME trademark
http://www.gnome.org/groupon/

GNOME starts campaign to protect its trademarks - GNOME
http://www.gnome.org/news/2014/11/gnome-starts-campaign-to-protect-its-trademarks/

Gnome Foundation and Groupon product names (UPDATED) | - Groupon Engineering Blog
https://engineering.groupon.com/2014/misc/gnome-foundation-and-groupon-product-names/

With the announcement of the tablet-based platform "Gnome", Groupon applied for Gnome's trademark registration with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Groupon applied for not only tablet-based platforms but also applications and services related to the serviceA total of 28 productsTo


Resentful of Groupup's movement is developing a free desktop environment "GNOME" that runs on the X Window SystemThe GNOME Foundationis. In 1999 GNOME released "GNOME 1.0Since it opened, we have repeated updates every six months, and in 2006 we have registered trademarks at the US Patent and Trademark Office. The GNOME Foundation requested Groupup to adopt a different product name, but the negotiations were difficult and we finally launched a campaign to protect the trademark.

Tobias Mueller, one of the administrators of The GNOME Foundation, said, "It is unbelievable that Groupup did not know GNOME, and we would like to continue fighting to protect GNOME," said Gruppon I talked in the release. However, according to The GNOME Foundation, it is necessary to complete the formal procedure by December 3, 2014 to prevent Groupup trademark registration. Because it costs about 80,000 dollars (about 9.3 million yen) in the procedure, through the release from Gnome loyal users and the open source communityI raised a donationThat's why.


Although a spectacular battle was spread between the two companies, Groupon revealed that it will withdraw its application for trademark registration on November 11, 2014 and choose another name for the product. "We are loving open source, we have several open source projects with Groupon github, building a good relationship with the open source community is more important than product name," said Sri Viswanath, General Manager of Engineering Division at Groupon. It is a thing, "a series of riots began.