Groupon Tried To Take GNOME's Name & Failed

[ I'm writing this last update to this post, which I posted at 15:55 US/Eastern on 2014-11-11, above the original post (and its other update), since the first text below is the most important message about this siutation. (Please note that I am merely a mundane GF member, and I don't speak for GF in any way.) ]

There is a lesson learned here, now that Groupon has (only after public admonishing from GNOME Foundation) decided to do what GNOME Foundation asked them for from the start. Specifically, I'd like to point out how it's all too common for for-profit companies to treat non-profit charities quite badly, even when the non-profit charity is involved in an endeavor that the for-profit company nominally “supports”.

The GNOME Foundation (GF) Board minutes are public; you can go and read them. If you do, you'll find that for many months, GF has been spending substantial time and resources to deal with this issue. They've begged Groupon to be reasonable, and Groupon refused. Then, GF (having at least a few politically savvy folks on their Board of Directors) decided they had to make the (correct) political next move and go public.

As a professional “Free Software politician”, I can tell you from personal experience that going public with a private dispute is always a gamble. It can backfire, and thus is almost always a “last hope” before the only other option: litigation. But, Groupon's aggressive stance and deceitful behavior seems to have left GF with little choice; I'd have done the same in GF's situation. Fortunately, the gamble paid off, and Groupon caved when they realized that GF would win — both in the court of public opinion and in a real court later.

However, this tells us something about the ethos of Groupon as a company: they are willing to waste the resources of a tiny non-profit charity (which is currently run exclusively by volunteers) simply because Groupon thought they could beat that charity down by outspending them. And, it's not as if it's a charity with a mission Groupon opposes — it's a charity operating in a space which Groupon claims to love.

I suppose I'm reacting so strongly to this because this is exactly the kind of manipulative behavior I see every day from GPL violators. The situations are quite analogous: a non-profit charity, standing up for a legal right of a group of volunteer Free Software developers, is viewed by that company like a bug the company can squash with their shoe. The company only gives up when they realize the bug won't die, and they'll just have to give up this time and let the bug live.

GF frankly and fortunately got off a little light. For my part, the companies (and their cronies) that oppose copyleft have called me a “copyright troll”, “guilty of criminal copyright abuse”, and also accused me of enforcing the GPL merely to “get rich” (even though my salary has been public since 1999 and is less than all of theirs). Based on my experience with GPL enforcement, I can assure you: Groupon had exactly two ways to go politically: either give up almost immediately once the dispute was public (which they did), or start attacking GF with dirty politics.

Having personally often faced the aforementioned “next political step” by the for-profit company in similar situations, I'm thankful that GF dodged that, and we now know that Groupon is unlikely to make dirty political attacks against GF as their next move. However, please don't misread this situation: Groupon didn't “do something nice just because GF asked them to”, as the Groupon press people are no doubt at this moment feeding the tech press for tomorrow's news cycle. The real story is: “Groupon stonewalled, wasting limited resources of a small non-profit for months, and gave up only when the non-profit politically outflanked them”.

---

My original post and update from earlier in the day on 2014-11-11 follows as they originally appeared:

It's probably been at least a d