In today's open source roundup: Groupon has launched a tablet product that violates the GNOME Foundation's registered trademark. Plus: Reviews of OpenMandriva 2014.1. And the successes, failures and new challenges of Mozilla's Firefox browser Groupon forces the GNOME Foundation to defend its trademark The GNOME Foundation has launched a fundraising effort to defend its GNOME trademark in light of Groupon’s launch of a tablet product with a similar name. This has caused shockwaves throughout the Linux community as angry users rally to GNOME’s cause. OMG Ubuntu reports that Groupon seemed to know exactly what it was doing when it launched its GNOME tablet product: Could it just be that they’ve never heard of GNOME before? Highly unlikely. Even the most Saul Goodman-y of lawyers would first check existing trademarks and investigate the company(s) owning or contesting. Even assuming that lapse in professionalism, most would have at least given the name a quick Google. Damningly, the company has previously claimed to be ‘fuelled by open-source’. More at OMG Ubuntu OMG Ubuntu Softpedia notes that the GNOME Foundation did give Groupon notice that it was violating the GNOME trademark, but Groupon apparently did not care: As you can imagine, the GNOME trademark has been in effect for many years, since 2006, but owning it is not enough, especially if your trademark is attacked by a huge company who really wants it. The GNOME Foundation is non-profit and it doesn’t have the required funds to protect itself against big business interests that are willing to throw a lot of money on lawyers and trials. The GNOME Foundation members saw that Groupon wanted to make a product called Gnome and did what any trademark holder does. They informed Groupon they had the trademark and that they needed to rename it. Instead of renaming it, Groupon, which is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, has filed for its own trademarks, and basically, started a legal war. More at Softpedia The GNOME Foundation has set up a page that explains the situation and offers a way for you to donate to help protect GNOME from Groupon’s trademark violations: Recently Groupon announced a product with the same product name as GNOME. Groupon’s product is a tablet based point of sale “operating system for merchants to run their entire operation.” The GNOME community was shocked that Groupon would use our mark for a product so closely related to the GNOME desktop and technology. It was almost inconceivable to us that Groupon, with over $2.5 billion in annual revenue, a full legal team and a huge engineering staff would not have heard of the GNOME project, found our trademark registration using a casual search, or even found our website, but we nevertheless got in touch with them and asked them to pick another name. Not only did Groupon refuse, but it has now filed even more trademark applications (the full list of applications they filed can be found here, here and here). To use the GNOME name for a proprietary software product that is antithetical to the fundamental ideas of the GNOME community, the free software community and the GNU project is outrageous. Please help us fight this huge company as they try to trade on our goodwill and hard earned reputation. More at GNOME.org Angry Linux users on Reddit are rallying to the cause of GNOME: “Made me totally disgusted, and makes me wonder why the hell anyone should care about getting a trademark if someone can just file one of their own and then fight you. $60 donated. I too hope that Google, Red Hat, and other large players can put a bit of their resources into this.” More at Reddit OpenMandriva 2014.1 reviews OpenMandriva 2014.1 has been out for a little while now, but there haven’t been many reviews of this distribution. However, DistroWatch has just released a review of OpenMandriva 2014.1 and indicates that it might have great appeal for beginners. I’ve also included a video review below from YouTube so you can see OpenMandriva in action. Jesse Smith at DistroWatch thinks that OpenMandriva 2014.1 does a good job implementing systemd: This version of OpenMandriva was presented mostly as a bug-fix and polish release and that shows. The operating system is stable and the interface looks friendly. For the most part, the distribution worked very well for me. OpenMandriva has a sense of polish and friendliness about it which is hard to qualify, but is certainly there. The system installer, the Control Centre and the pretty (yet traditional) desktop environment all appear to be designed to be as newcomer friendly as possible. I was especially impressed by the systemd front end. Recent experiments with Arch, openSUSE and Debian have left a bad taste in my mouth has far as systemd is concerned and OpenMandriva did a beautiful job of smoothing over the details of systemd while presenting a functional front end. During my trial I ran into two minor glitches, both with package management, but nothing that really caused me any concern. In recent years I think it has been too easy to think of the Mandriva-based projects as “also ran” distributions. The financial troubles Mandriva faced and the user friendly efforts of projects like Ubuntu and Mint have conspired to push Mandriva out of the spotlight. OpenMandriva 2014.1 is one of the best efforts I have seen to date to take back the “beginner friendly” crown. This distribution was easy to set up, easy to use, has a great control centre and should appeal to both novice users and power users alike. I was happy and a bit impressed with OpenMandriva 2014.1 and I recommend giving it a try. More at DistroWatch Joseph Dickson in a YouTube video review finds OpenMandriva 2014 to be a very smooth and highly configurable distribution: More at YouTube The successes, failures and new challenges of Mozilla’s Firefox browser Firefox has been an amazing success story over the last ten years, but Mozilla’s browser has stumbled recently as Google’s Chrome and other browsers have upstaged it. And Firefox also has some new challenges. It’s not just competing with other browsers, it’s preparing to take on Android and iOS. Sean Michael Kerner at Internet News speculates that the glory days of Firefox may finally be over: Firefox today, 10 years later is not the same massive success it was early on. Chrome is vastly more popular (and by some measures, faster and more feature-rich too). Safari provides a superior experience on Apple platforms than Mozilla ever has and Microsoft has invested in IE innovation (though security is still a large concern). It is clear today that Firefox will never achieve the same success that Netscape or even IE once held. Google has outmaneuvered Mozilla, the lack of real desktop innovation focus has been lost on Firefox and quite simply the magic isn’t all there, like it was in 2004. More at Internet News Stephen Shankland at CNet notes that Firefox is now also competing with Android and iOS: Instead of just taking on a browser, Mozilla now is competing against two operating systems, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Mozilla’s alternative is Firefox OS, a browser-based operating system. The goal remains the same, though: give people choice about what technology they use on the Internet and give them control over their data. iOS dominates the high end of the smartphone market, Android dominates the larger remainder, and Mozilla hopes Firefox OS will pry their jaws open by claiming some of the low-end market where people only now are moving up from basic feature phones, Gal said. More at CNet What’s your take on all this? Tell me in the comments below. Open Source