I agree with 2 but not with 1. I think there are loads of people out there who have heard that there is something like Linux, but have never used it. If you never used any *nix you probably don't even know that desktop environments can be switched or changed. Then how would you know about a specific desktop environment? Not accepting to respect a 17 year old trademark is very, very bad though.
There's not one single engineer that saw the conflict with the name 'GNOME'? If so, their engineering team is hopeless.
(Note that I don't think erikb deserves the downvotes, I think a lot of people will give them the benefit of a doubt by saying 'maybe they don't know', but someone at Groupon had to know, and that person was ignored, and now Groupon deserves the wrath of the community)
You think the team creating a POS terminal at Groupon hadn't heard of GNOME?
The very first thing you do when considering customer facing names for products is a web search: first page of hits for me is filled with GNOME desktop.
Yes, but often people don't do what they are supposed to do. I did the same mistake with an open source project I've written for my thesis. Things like that happen all the time. Especially for people in Windows world there is not much else outside. They probably haven't heard about TextMate or XCode either.
