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Groupon flees from army of angry GNOMES: Trademark bid for 'Gnome' tab scrapped

Run away, run away!

Groupon has given up its pursuit of the trademark "Gnome", intended for its sales register tablet, after being chased off by the open-source GNOME project.

The upstart voucher flinger told The Register that it was no longer looking to trademark "Gnome" in the wake of outrage from folks at the Linux desktop software foundation of the same name.

The GNOME project started raising tens of thousands of dollars to fund official filings objecting to Groupon's Gnome trademark applications – and after outcry across the web in support of the foundation, Groupon today backed off.

Groupon had hoped to name a sales terminal tablet after the made-up magical creatures (gnomes, not Linux desktop users).

Back in May, the voucher biz announced: "Gnome will soon integrate with popular accounting software programs such as QuickBooks and Xero and offer a suite of customer relationship management tools, including the ability to customize marketing campaigns based on purchase history, share customer feedback via social media and respond to customer inquiries or comments."

Now, however, the company's going to come up with another name.

"After additional conversations with the open-source community and the Gnome Foundation, we have decided to abandon our pending trademark applications for Gnome," the firm told The Register in a statement.

"We will choose a new name for our product going forward."

While the GNOME Foundation is a non-profit open-source project, its desktop software environment has some rather heavyweight backers: IBM, Google, Intel, Canonical and the Linux Foundation.

It may well be that Groupon decided, in this case, to pick its battles and step away from a court standoff with a well-connected foe. ®

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