OStatic

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'm not above admitting that I wish I'd thought of this before Dave Neary. This week, Neary called for input from businesses that have migrated from Windows and closed software to open alternatives.

Neary intends on assembling the responses as a series of case studies, with each study addressing a different stage in the migration process. Neary's request isn't industry-specific, and from the description of topics he'd like to cover, businesses with some degree of hybridization are invited to share their experiences.

When Microsoft announced it was planning to offer lightweight, web-based versions of some of its Office components, there was some speculation that maybe it could be used with alternate browsers. It seemed Firefox would be a likely candidate beyond IE, and some ventured to wonder about Safari.

Even if Firefox was supported, it didn't seem likely this suite would be specifically web based, so it would need Windows, right? According to a few sources it seems as if that might not be the case. Though the source is a Microsoft Community member blog (and not a pronouncement from corporate sources) the concept of this service on Mac and Linux is fascinating because it suggests so much about what Microsoft might be thinking.

FOSSBazaar recently highlighted Evangelia Berdou's doctoral thesis on the differences between the contributions of paid open source developers and volunteer contributors.

Berdou examined parallels and disconnects between paid and volunteer contributors in the GNOME and KDE projects, using earlier incidents of such events (such as the Gstreamer/Fluendo SL summit). The hypotheses and analysis she presents are thought-provoking.

Earlier this week, the Qt Labs at Nokia announced a new project, QtMobility. QtMobility's primary goal is to offer a new set of Qt API development tools for mobile device applications.

While this will certainly make life easier for developers working with the Qt framework on specific Nokia devices, one of the best (and intentional) fringe benefits is that the new API tools are cross-platform. A single application, then, can be built and maintained for any supported Qt platform -- regardless of the mobile device model or manufacturer.

How do you know when a proposed software contract principle is really broken? When the Linux Foundation and Microsoft have their respective legal departments sit down and pen a joint letter asking it be reconsidered. ZDNet's Mary-Jo Foley has written a nice, legalese-free summation of the story.

In short, the American Law Institute (ALI) has proposed some guiding principles for judges, lawyers and other legal professionals working with software-related cases to aid in settling software licensing issues. Given how quickly everything about software delivery and production changes, this in and of itself is a decent enough idea. The problem is one particular principle, a policy calling for a non-disclaimable implied warranty of no material hidden defects. Both the Linux Foundation and Microsoft say this is a disadvantage all around -- discriminating and subtlely changing between various licensing, business, and distribution models.

As some OStatic readers have likely already heard, Microsoft is taking TomTom, a manufacturer of in-car navigation devices, to court for patent infringement. This is especially disturbing to those in the open source world for at least two reasons -- Microsoft's previous claims that Linux violates over two hundred patents it currently holds, and three of the claims against TomTom deal with TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel in its products.

Techdirt's Mike Masnick presents some good analysis of the story, including links to the patents in question and those with particularly tenuous claims (in terms of infringement and patentability, in a few instances). While this is worrisome to those who use Linux, and certainly causing TomTom executives to lose sleep, I can't help but wonder, really, what this positioning actually means. Why is this coming up now? If hundreds of Microsoft patents are being violated, why go after a company infringing on eight (with three relating directly to Linux)? And why TomTom?

According to a poll conducted by software security company Palamida, most businesses expect their IT budget to drop in the coming months but less than half plan to use open source software to fill in the gaps. At first glance, that seems like some pretty lousy news and also appears to fly in the face of what we've heard before. Before we panic, let's take a closer look at what these survey results mean.

Open-source fans will be delighted to read a new survey published by O'Reilly Media, and announced at their annual Open Source Conference (OSCon), taking place this week in Portland, Oregon. Their report, called Open Source in the Enterprise, details the ways in which open source is being adopted by large organizations. The report indicates that overall usage of open source is growing, pointing to download statistics from Sourceforge along with usage trends inside of companies.

Under a new partnership unveiled today, Kaltura, maker of embeddable collaborative video webware, will bring video to the Wikimedia family of sites. The beta program, which is being dubbed an open, collaborative video experiment, will allow users to add and remix rich media via an embeddable player on wiki pages.