I don't think you can characterize it as being evil. There's also no clear ulterior motive for pushing through with the name, and "capitalizing on the name recognition of the Gnome project" is not a valid hypothesis since that name doesn't mean anything for 99% of Groupon's customers.
It looks more like they were just being a typical stubborn corporation. Some product manager got really attached to the name and they tried to hang on to it as a matter of course, because they're massive and feel they don't have to budge to anything. In the end, they caved to negative publicity, as any company in their position would.
You don't say anything that's not exactly right, but you're still missing the point.
They had the opportunity to own up to their mistake and seek the goodwill of the community. They missed that chance. Perhaps not "evil", but certainly worth some continued indignation.
Evil was the point, I don't think I missed that. It seems to me your point is I failed to recognize how much indignation this caused, but that wasn't really within the scope of the comment I was replying to. And I'm not trying to debate whether continued indignation is warranted or not.
My suspicion is it'll blow over pretty quickly, though, if for no other reason than there are more pressing issues keeping most open source developers awake as opposed to an already resolved trademark dispute which never even went to court. This was a good day, wasn't it?
Whilst GNOME has not fully disclosed the information, which has been disgust for months at Board Meetings, I would stand by the evil comment. Groupon, the massive for profit organisation, made a conscious decision ("Not only did Groupon refuse ...")to basically say FU to GNOME. They then used their position as a major organisation to try and coerce them into an unacceptable situation("alternative branding options") which included filling more trademark applications.
I would, and do, call them bullies and bullies are evil.
I see your point, though I would still reserve the word for stuff that is at least an order of magnitude more troubling. Including this comment, I said so three times in different variations, and the fact that we're arguing over this word still means we probably can't arrive at a common definition of what constitutes "1.0 units of evil" which we all agree on.
Barring this common definition, I'd rather talk about the facts of what happened, or even useful speculation and opinions about it, than to discuss labels that have different meanings for every single person reading this.
It's getting a bit unproductive. I'm sorry to have entered this discussion now because it makes me sound like I'm defending behavior that I don't actually support.
It looks more like they were just being a typical stubborn corporation. Some product manager got really attached to the name and they tried to hang on to it as a matter of course, because they're massive and feel they don't have to budge to anything. In the end, they caved to negative publicity, as any company in their position would.