GNOME starts campaign to protect its trademarks

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

Recently, Groupon launched Gnome, 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‘,” said Tobias Mueller, one of the directors of the GNOME Foundation.

“We will not give up but 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 page, share the link, and let Groupon know that they behaved terribly”.

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