I agree. It's time all the underlings stop fighting their destiny!!

The end user would see it as part of an operating system - which it does become. All I'm seeing here on Slashdot is what must be a bunch of Groupon employees trolling Slashdot trying to defend their company. But they will lose this trademark case.

Said the poster quoting executives inside Groupon!

As far as operating systems are concerned, they do in fact "own" the word "gnome." That is by definition of what a trademark is.

The gnome foundation does have a right to be concerned. With an point of sale system that offers a "gnome" operating environment, end users could easily confuse the two. And it seriously could affect the Gnome Foundation's ability to conduct any business in the future as their mark would be seriously diluted.

What is also disturbing is the hubris behind this. Clearly Groupon thought that they could steamroll over the Gnome Foundation!

I am not a user of gnome, and I know that developers and users have had disagreements with Gnome in the past, but that doesn't mean that users of open source software shouldn't stand behind the Gnome Foundation on this issue. As they have made significant contributions to GPL code and promoting open source software. This really is a no-brainer.

What computing system was used to render the video, and is there a paper available which describes some of the math behind the simulation?

You need to include those on the hardware end as well. Otherwise companies would just end up shafting a different type of tech worker. So not just programmers but tech workers in general.

Title of my upcoming book "Why Johnny can't use a Surface tablet" in bookstores everywhere.

And why you would lead shield the SOC heavily.

And here we have the question FTDI needed to ask before nuking people's equipment to deal with a crime that already took place.

Any BOM that passes through my hands will get FTDI crossed off. I'm sorry they have a counterfeit problem. They need to improve anti counterfeiting measures instead of inflicting collateral damage. Their abrupt decision is smelly no matter how you look at it.

This is exactly what I was looking at. Are the USB chips covered by FTDI patents? What process are they assigned a PID?

In other words, why not just give it your own Chinese trademark and move on?

Except that the end consumer has zero knowledge about these counterfeit chips inside whatever they bought. And my guess is a most slashdotters do not either, until it stops working because of FTDI.

Tangentially, you manage to bring up a very good point. One huge problem is the software projects might be using. A number of companies open sourced their software before the notion of a 'standardized' license method became prevalent. If a project is not Mozilla, GPL, or BSD compatible then it will have a very hard time attracting new developers. I know would not want to work on something that did not have a useful open source license. I would encourage the submitter to make sure whatever he is working on have a standard, permissive as possible license (if possible) before he closes shop.

I know one interesting project (from a historical perspective) that suffers from this is the Open Watcom compiler with its non-compatible Sybase Public License. This project fits the submitter's description to a tee. I bet there are others like this. At least POV-Ray got around to fixing their license finally.