[TriLUG] GNOME trademark issue

[Steve Litt]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2014 13:15:28 -0500
"M. R." <13miketele at bellsouth.net> wrote:

> I'm not against donations from us little mice, but there  are  some 
> heavy hitters  out there with a possible stake in this: Sun, RH, 
> SUSE.... They have many more spare shekels than this little cheese 
> eater. Are they stepping up to the plate?

Three reasons I won't be contributing:

1) I read the respective trademarks of both Groupon and the Gnome
   Foundation (serial #76368848), and although I'm not a lawyer, it's
   obvious none of the trademark apps causes confusion, in the
   marketplace, with the others. The Gnome Foundation's and Groupon's
   marks can coexist, even in the same product classes. There's no
   trademark conflict here, unless one considers the Gnome Foundation's
   the Gnome Foundation's mark "Famous" in the legal sense, which I
   doubt would hold water.

2) Gnome is a huge part of Red Hat's strategy for Linux, so I'm sure
   Red Hat will do whatever's necessary to protect the interests of
   Gnome, to the extent possible, without my help.

3) Gnome, with the help of OpenDesktop and Red Hat, are in the process
   of eliminating most init choices, in favor of what I consider an
   overly featureful, and probably difficult to repair, systemd. I'm
   spending all my effort trying to ensure myself a systemd-less future
   Unix-like OS like I've been using the past 15 years, and can ill
   afford the time or money to help those responsible for my added
   workload.

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
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