Garmin bought Opencaching.com

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ijeep
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Re: Garmin bought Opencaching.com

Post by ijeep » Sun Jan 16, 2011 6:04 pm

Are you sure? because at the bottom of the page you are talking about is:

Geocaching.com data provided by Groundspeak subject to the Terms of Use.
geocaching.com logo


Which gives a link to gc.com's terms of use. Groundspeak really does not like people scraping their site, so this looks like an agreement between Garmin & GS (5 cache limit). It has nothing to do with OC.com as far as I can see. Using the MyGarmin links you provided, I checked an area with opencaches and they do not show up. Only gc.com hides do.

Seeing as how the OC.com API allows you to get unlimited caches (and several developers are doing just that with web/iphone/android apps) I don't see why they would place a 5 cache limit on themselves for OC data. This is clearly Groundspeak's imposed limit.
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Re: Garmin bought Opencaching.com

Post by TermiteHunter » Sun Jan 16, 2011 9:09 pm

The hypertext links that do not show in the copied text linked first to OC com where it was talking about getting caches yhen it said if you want more than 5 caches to go to the geocaching site ( which linked to the GC site). There was no scrapping of the gc site it just linked to gc. There was no collevting of GC caches for you. The links at the bottom are more for rrference and legal issues.

None of the sites limit downloads as fsr as I know and that limit may just be erronious text from some web tech for the site. Ifyou want to check it out it is on the garmin site in the faq section. Its not that important, I just found it odd

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Re: Garmin bought Opencaching.com

Post by ROADRUNNER420 » Fri May 06, 2011 10:34 am

HI everyone new to this site. the difference is that if you load from garmin it give you the info and hints about the cache. But if you download it from Geocaching.com it will not - only if your a member of Geocache.com . but you can still download it with out the info. You can download same cache @ garmin after and get the info of cache if you want- only if your not a member of geocaching.com . So that's why i think its a limit of 5 per 24 hrs @ garmin , hope that helps. Have fun hunting. :mrgreen:

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Re: Garmin bought Opencaching.com

Post by Mr.Yuck » Sat Nov 23, 2013 10:13 am

RVRoadTrip wrote:I posted a question to Garmin on their forums... Why did you take and existing name, rebrand it and launch a site using it?

I also found that the only communication garmin had with anyone from the OC community was to determine the cache prefix. Garmin wanted to us OC but it was already in use, so they settled on OX. Garmin asked one of the OC developers to sign an NDA to talk in detail but the dev refused so garmin didn't say much else. Now that the site is live, much of what we wanted to know is now public... everything but the "why".
As I said in another thread I am bumping, I was scouring the forum for spammers that snuck some spam by us over the years. I actually found about 10 of them. :mrgreen:

Wow, wasn't this an interesting conversation!! Started approximately 1 month before the Garmin site actually went live, and continuing until well after it did go live. And we had so many freaking posters back then!! The post I'm quoting is also very interesting, real documentation of exactly what contact Garmin had with the Opencaching network. I had known they did contact us about the prefix, but that's the first I heard of Garmin asking for a non disclosure agreement to discuss anything.

Funny story, I was talking to an old friend I only see every few years. He knows how I am a Geocacher, and asked how it was going. I told him how I'm an admin for this site now. He said he was going to check it out, and ended up going to Opencaching.com. I said "no, that's Garmin the GPS manufacturer, they cluelessly took our name". After explaining how all that happened, and how our OC was founded in 2004, he said "you should have gotten a court order when they launched it, no judge in America would have let them use the name". I was thinking darn, he's probably right. But what's done is done. Not like anyone who's ever been an admin around here was going to pay for a lawyer to go up against Garmin. :lol:
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Re: Garmin bought Opencaching.com

Post by TermiteHunter » Sun Nov 24, 2013 1:50 am

I to have had the same issue with directing people to OC.us and them finding OC.com instead.
Dot com is the standard and .us is VERY unique.
I take it there are no lawyers on OC.us interested in some pro-bono work

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Re: Garmin bought Opencaching.com

Post by Mr.Yuck » Wed Dec 04, 2013 2:07 pm

TermiteHunter wrote:I to have had the same issue with directing people to OC.us and them finding OC.com instead.
Dot com is the standard and .us is VERY unique.
I take it there are no lawyers on OC.us interested in some pro-bono work
If there were any interested in pro-bono work, I sure they would have come forward in December, 2010. :D I seriously never thought of that, people voiced their opinion, and didn't like the whole thing, but a lawyer could have stopped it, I'm sure.

We don't get a lot of "log-in problem" emails at octeam at Opencaching.us (maybe one every week or two on average), but as of late, most are traced to people confusing us with opencaching.com. Example, "I can't log in", and you look in the database and find no record of the email address or username they say they used to sign up. I attribute this mainly to our high Google search result, and still above them. :mrgreen:
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Re: Garmin bought Opencaching.com

Post by chilehead » Wed Jan 15, 2014 9:37 am

With the announcement this week of the Garmin GPSMap 64 family of products, with 250,000 caches preloaded from geocaching.com, and the geocaching.com logo on the screen, the days of opencaching.com seem numbered.

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Re: Garmin bought Opencaching.com

Post by DudleyGrunt » Wed Jan 15, 2014 10:18 am

I saw that. Now, if they will just relinquish the domain name.
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chilehead
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Re: Garmin bought Opencaching.com

Post by chilehead » Wed Jan 15, 2014 10:25 am

DudleyGrunt wrote:I saw that. Now, if they will just relinquish the domain name.
I imagine that will never happen. The "real" opencaching network should have bought it when it was available. Garmin has too many references to opencaching.com in their devices, literature, and online. If they do decide to abandon their listing site and completely make up with Groundspeak, then I would imagine eventually opencaching.com will redirect to geocaching.com ... why would they make it available to the opencaching network if they have a new partnership with Groundspeak?

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Re: Garmin bought Opencaching.com

Post by Mr.Yuck » Wed Jan 15, 2014 1:19 pm

chilehead wrote:
DudleyGrunt wrote:I saw that. Now, if they will just relinquish the domain name.
I imagine that will never happen. The "real" opencaching network should have bought it when it was available. Garmin has too many references to opencaching.com in their devices, literature, and online. If they do decide to abandon their listing site and completely make up with Groundspeak, then I would imagine eventually opencaching.com will redirect to geocaching.com ... why would they make it available to the opencaching network if they have a new partnership with Groundspeak?
This is it. This is the end. There's no way in heck they'd put that trademarked Geocaching.com logo on the screen and have 250,000 pre-loaded caches, and keep opencaching.com running. The right thing to do, especially seeing they've already wronged the OpenCaching Network once, would be to relinquish the domain name, but Chilehead is probably right.

Pre-loaded caches is a relatively new development. I know the Magellan the Wife bought me in late 2011 had a few thousand, as well as the Official Geocaching.com logo, *and* signal the frog on the navigation dashboard screen (although you can get rid of him). Does anyone know if Garmin ever made any units with pre-loaded Geocaching.com caches prior to that fateful day in December 2010 when OC.com went live?
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