New EndNote Version Compatible with OpenOffice; Zotero Contributors Served Subpoenas

by Kristin Shoemaker - May. 11, 2009Comments (0)

The "Mixed Message" award for today goes to Thomson Reuters, the company that brings us, among other things, the EndNote bibliographic/citation management software. Information Today is reporting that the latest update to EndNote, coming this June, features "Cite While You Write" technology that formats citations automatically is fully compatible with OpenOffice.org's Writer component.

This is definitely welcome news for those who use EndNote and OpenOffice. It is a heartening sign that the open source office suite is a heavyweight, a real competitor in the market. It's great to see Thomson Reuters working to make EndNote work with the applications its audience desires.

It's also at least a little bit jarring when Zotero, an open source browser add on that can convert EndNote file formats to an open format, was served a subpoena to hand over contributor information to Thomson Reuter's lawyers.

I wrote a bit about the lawsuit last fall, when it was originally filed in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The main complaint was that Zotero developers were reverse engineering the actual EndNote application, which is certainly in violation of the EndNote EULA. The questionable area is, of course, that the application wasn't reverse engineered, the file format was, to enable the conversion from a proprietary file format to an open one.

Law student and GNOME contributor Luis Villa speculates that this is certainly meant to intimidate, and discusses a bit what contributors to any software development efforts should know and consider if they should ever find themselves in a similar situation.

The timing and vastly conflicting signals of these incidents are telling -- there is a lot that businesses, publishers, and software developers don't quite grasp about open source software, or open formats. EndNote working with an open source application such as OpenOffice is a giant step forward -- but keeping a file format proprietary, locking user generated content away from not only other applications, but often even the user creating it, keeps technology hopelessly bound to the dark ages.


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