GroupOn, a sort of Internet sales discount coupon company has recently announced a point-of-sale tablet called “Gnome”. The GNOME Foundation, by virtue of having used that name since the 1990’s and having trademarked it in 2006, objects strongly to what it sees as a blatant infringement of its trademark. The organization is scrambling to file its opposition to GroupOn’s new trademark filings, but that takes work — and money. So there is now a fund-raising effort in the works to help make this opposition happen. “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.“
Open Source Accelerating the Pace of Software
When we talk about the innovation that communities bring to open source software, we often focus on how open source enables contributions and collaboration within communities. More contributors, collaborating with less friction.
Distribution Release: Q4OS 0.5.20
Q4OS 0.5.20, a lightweight and minimalist desktop Linux distribution featuring the Trinity desktop (a fork of KDE 3.5) and based on Debian GNU/Linux 7, has been released: “Significant update 0.5.20 of Q4OS is out. The essential new feature is the KDE 4 desktop integration into Q4OS system.”
diff -u: What’s New in Kernel Development
Hardware errors are tough to code for. In some cases, they’re impossible to code for. A particular brand of hardware error is the Machine-Check Exception (MCE), which means a CPU has a problem. On Windows systems, it’s one of the causes of the Blue Screen of Death. more>>