Following on from news yesterday of the threat to the GNOME trademark from a series of applications for the same name by Groupon (posts passim), the latter has now withdrawn those applications and issued the following statement.
Groupon is a strong and consistent supporter of the open source community, and our developers are active contributors to a number of open source projects. We’ve been communicating with the Foundation for months to try to come to a mutually satisfactory resolution, including alternative branding options, and we’re happy to continue those conversations. Our relationship with the open source community is more important to us than a product name. And if we can’t come up with a mutually acceptable solution, we’ll be glad to look for another name.
UPDATE: After additional conversations with the open source community and the Gnome Foundation, we have decided to abandon our pending trademark applications for “Gnome”. We will choose a new name for our product going forward.
The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organisation promoting the goals of the GNOME Project, helping it to create a free software computing platform for the general public that is designed to be elegant, efficient and easy to use.
The Foundation is currently facing a threat to its GNOME trademark from global deal-of-the-day website merchants Groupon, who have recently announced a product that’s also called Gnome. Groupon’s Gnome comes in the form of a tablet-based point-of-sale “operating system for merchants to run their entire operation.” It therefore has little to do with creating an elegant, efficient, easy to use free software platform for the general public, but more with liberating cash from the wallets and purses of the general public. The Groupon offering is shown on the left.
As a result of this threat from Groupon, the GNOME Foundation has released the following statement and appeal for funds.
“GNOME” has been a familiar name in software for the past 17 years, and a registered trademark since 2006. The GNOME project has been a staple desktop for GNU/Linux and BSD desktops. It was the default desktop for Sun Microsystems workstation class machines, continues to be the default desktop for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server distributions, and it is the default desktop of Fedora and Debian. SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service solution for the retail industry is based on GNOME. GNOME technology can be found in TVs, tablets, phones, consumer devices, and in common software everywhere.
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.
We want to show that our brand matters and that you care. Of the 28 trademark applications Groupon filed, we have to file formal proceedings to oppose 10 of them by December 3, 2014. Help us raise the funds to fight back and most of all call public attention to this terrible behavior by Groupon. Help us make sure that when people hear about GNOME software they learn about freedom and not proprietary software. Our counsel has advised us that we will need $80,000 to oppose the registration of the first set of 10 applications. If we are able to defend the mark without spending this amount, we will use the remaining funds to bolster and improve GNOME. Please help us raise the money to protect GNOME’s trademark and strengthen Free Software!
Debian 8, codenamed Jessie, will be the next stable release of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system.
The Debian release team has frozen the current software status of Jessie, German IT news site heise reports. From now on the developers will only include important bug fixes in the distribution.
Jonathan Wiltshire of Debian’s release team has announced that the current software status of Debian Jessie (version 8 of the operating system) has been frozen according to plan. The only changes that are now possible are only bug fixes for critical errors and major bug fixes for program packages that do not form the core of the Debian distribution.
At present the developers have counted over 300 release-critical bugs for Jessie, but there is still no definite deadline for the release of Jessie as Debian’s next stable release, although this will probably be in the next few months.
Your correspondent has been using Debian Jessie on his laptop for over one year now and it’s been very stable and reliable, even though it was still in the testing phase and not really intended for use in a production environment.
Omnis Systems in Brighton is organising an event – Open Source, the Cloud and your Business – at Sussex County Cricket Club, Hove, BN3 3AN (map) on Tuesday 18th November.
Many organisations in the private, public, voluntary and community sectors are now starting to look seriously or are in part using “the Cloud” and Open Source technology. However, there is still some as to the business benefits that can be realised by using these tools.
Those who worry are not alone. Very often even IT resellers and consultants find it difficult to understand if they are offering the best solutions to their customers as they have limited visibility on what is available apart from the offerings from their standard vendors.
This seminar will be examining what Cloud and Open source technology actually are, how public and private sector organisations are using them and what business opportunities they offer. The seminar will also explore a few of the common myths that surround those technologies and get into some real life case studies on how organisations can benefit.
Time
Description
Speakers
09:00 / 09:30
Registration & event presentation
09:30 / 10:00
Cloud, Open Source or both? Understanding what “Cloud” really is. The definition, the services, the good, the bad and the ugly. There are very useful aspects of the Cloud to consider but there are also some issues that have security, economical and ethical impacts you may have not considered.
Paolo Vecchi Omnis Systems
10:00 / 10:30
How you could help the Public Sector in being more efficient by offering your services through G-Cloud and how we can help you getting there faster.
Local government representative from London talking about their experience with Open Source and Open Alliances that could be formed between organisations to share code and experiences (Awaiting confirmation and full speech description)
TBA
12:30 / 13:30
Lunch break and networking
13:30 / 14:00
Technology Choices for Business Strategy
Businesses compete fiercely in an ever faster changing market. Public bodies too must deliver better for less. Their strategic response is to focus on users, iterate products, drive down costs, design for easy change, share knowledge and experience, and widen access to more kinds of suppliers and innovation. Find out how your technology choices can support business aims.
Tariq Rashid, speaking in a personal capacity, previously leading on open source for the Cabinet Office.
Open what? Does Open Source matter to my business? It may matter as, like it or not, you are using a lot of it but your suppliers don’t want to tell you.
We will also look at examples of how IT resellers let down their customers by selling them the wrong solutions for the job and how Councils spend (badly?) our money…
… and at a few tools, including Collax V-Cube & Business Server, that businesses can adopt to consolidate their IT infrastructure, simplify its management and reduce costs.
Paolo Vecchi Omnis Systems
14:30 / 15:00
Zarafa Communication Platform a safer & cost-effective way to communicate
Zarafa has always been the best drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange but now is taking its ambitions further. With the inclusion of telephony, video conferencing, file & document sharing and many other features Zarafa is now ready to take on Office365 and GoogleApps. What’s the point? You can control your data & your privacy, integrate your applications and at the same time spend even less than by using general purpose Cloud applications.
Zarafa Communication Platform can be installed on Linux distributions like RedHat, Ubuntu and Debian. In this presentation it will be shown running on Univention Corporate Server which allows you to manage your Linux based infrastructure using a professionally designed web interface.
LibreOffice-from-Collabora provides an enterprise hardened and supported build of the world’s most popular Open Source ‘Office’ software LibreOffice. Large Corporate and Public Sector organisations now have a secure and long term supported alternative to proprietary Office software.
Hamburg’s Green want to wean the city council off its Microsoft dependency and are pointing to Munich city council’s use of Linux and free and open source software, German IT news website heise reports today.
The 2014 Open IT Summit, whose emphasis is on open source and data security, is taking place today (Tuesday) as an alternative event to the IT summit with German Chancellor Angela Merkel taking place in Hamburg. The range of topics extends from the Heartbleed bug via cloud computing up to a Microsoft exit strategy for Hamburg. a podium discussion will sound out whether a migration to free software is realistic for Hamburg.
On 28th September 2014 The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice productivity suite will both turn four. In that time LibreOffice has had eight major releases, close to 100 million downloads, attracted over 800 new developers, a large number of active volunteers in every corner of the planet and millions of desktops “migrating” from proprietary to free office suites.
LibreOffice is the fastest growing free software project of this decade: for 48 months in a row, it has been able to attract at least three new code contributors per month and an even higher number of volunteers active in localisation, quality assurance, marketing, communications and the development of local communities.
Earlier today (25th September) The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3.2; this is the second minor release of the LibreOffice 4.3 family, further improving the quality of the most advanced and feature-rich free office suite for Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. Further details of the release of LibreOffice 4.3.2 are available on The Document Foundation’s blog.
Heise reports that the major change in version from 1.48 to the newly released version 2.0 of the Calibre e-book management software are not apparent in its interface or feature list. However, on the inside the developers have converted the code to the Qt 5 GUI library and thus eliminated quite a few errors which were due to the Qt 4 library previously used. In particular, errors in text display should therefore be a thing of the past. Nevertheless, Calibre 2.0 no longer supports Windows XP and OS X versions prior to 10.7 (Lion). Anyone using these dated operating systems would be better off sticking with Calibre 1.48.
However, the developers of version 2.0 have still added some new features. The software can now also synchronise e-books under OS X with MTP mobile devices (Android phones and tablets). There is a new Mark Books tool that can be used to mark books temporarily. The mark appears as a little pushpin icon next to the book and all marks are automatically cleared by restarting calibre. A detailed version history can be seen in the changelog.
According to the official Xinhua news agency, China is hoping to launch a sovereign operating system in October in order to “wean” itself off operating systems developed abroad such as Windows, Le Monde Informatique reports. The Chinese OS, which still has no official name according to Xinhua, will be offered initially for desktop PCs, before being rolled out subsequently for smartphones. It will probably be a Linux distribution that has been revised and fixed by the Chinese security agencies and will be named China Operating System (COS). Xinhua quoted a report by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technologies (MIIT), the organisation entrusted inter alia with the regulation and development of the software sector in China. “We are hoping to launch a desktop PC operating system in October to support [local] app stores,” said Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Mr Ni heads up the alliance for the development of the official operating system created last March in the People’s Republic of China.
According to the MIIT, Mr Ni cites the end of support for Windows XP and the ban on Windows 8 on Chinese government computers as an opportunity for the launch of a domestic OS. Earlier this year the Chinese authorities banned the use of Windows 8 on government computers, a move triggered following the end of support for Windows XP in April. Prior to that the authorities denounced Microsoft regarding the ending of security updates for the 13 year-old operating system. China was historically a bastion of Windows XP, largely due to the large-scale pirating of Microsoft software. Another reason for China’s discontent is thought to be the revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
China has long disagreed with foreign technology companies, particularly Microsoft and Google – but also sometimes with Apple – as regards their impact and influence in the country. However, the animosity increased considerably last month when the Chinese anti-trust authorities raided several Microsoft offices, seizing computers and documents within the scope of their investigation. This investigation was launched following complaints made in July 2013 into the manner in which Microsoft Windows and Office are linked and the compatibility between Windows and Office.
A Red Flag base for the sovereign Chinese OS?
Screenshot of Red Flag Linux. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.China has been working on its own operating system for nearly fifteen years. Launched in August 1999, the Red Flag Linux distribution was partly financed by the government’s Information Ministry. The same year Red Flag was recommended as the replacement for Windows 2000 on all government PCs. The tensions at that time between the Chinese government and Microsoft were the origin for this directive. However, this local Linux distribution never took off and Red Flag Software, the company behind this local Chinese OS, closed down this year. However, the Red Flag OS is going to be revived.
A report published by the MIIT on 20th August states that the assets of Red Flag Software have been acquired by Penta Wan Jing Information Technology Industry Group for RMB 38.62 mn. This sudden new development was also officially recorded by Mr Ni, who approved Penta Wan Jing’s acquisition and stated that a revitalised Red Flag distribution could contribute to the project to create a sovereign operating system.
The operating system based on the Linux kernel (sometimes also called GNU/Linux. Ed.), in all its myriad forms, is 23 years old today.
It all began with an email by a young Helsinki University student called Linus Torvalds to the comp.os.minix newsgroup.
Linus’ original email is reproduced below.
Hello everybody out there using minix –
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them 🙂
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
I love Linus’ modest assertion that his creation wouldn’t be big and professional like GNU! 🙂
Following on from news yesterday of the threat to the GNOME trademark from a series of applications for the same name by Groupon (posts passim), the latter has now withdrawn those applications and issued the following statement.
The Foundation is currently facing a threat to its GNOME trademark from global deal-of-the-day website merchants 
Debian 8, codenamed Jessie, will be the next stable release of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system.
Hamburg’s Green want to wean the city council off its Microsoft dependency and are pointing to Munich city council’s use of Linux and free and open source software, German IT news website 
On the occasion of the impending 
The operating system based on the Linux kernel (sometimes also called GNU/Linux. Ed.), in all its myriad forms, is 23 years old today.