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.

The patent dispute between automotive GPS manufacturer TomTom and Microsoft has come to a close, with both sides settling the original suit and countersuit. CNet has a short but informative summary of at least some of the terms (certain financial specifics were not disclosed). The terms are written in order to preserve TomTom's compliance with its obligations under the GPL v.2 licenses on its code. TomTom must also remove functionality from its products that are related to the two file management systems that were under contention in the suit.

This is, at least for the upcoming agreed-upon five year period, how it will be between TomTom and Microsoft. It's been settled, and very little (at least from the Microsoft and TomTom camps), has been officially said about the three patents that dealt with TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel. It's over, but have the final notes been sung?

In February, Microsoft filed suit against TomTom, claiming that the portable GPS manufacturer had violated eight of its patents. Three of the patents in question dealt in some manner with TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel.

While Microsoft's Horacio Gutierrez stated the lawsuit is between TomTom and Microsoft, and not an attack on the Linux kernel as whole, many in the open source world are wary. The Linux Foundation's Executive Director, Jim Zemlin, has said that it would be prudent to keep an eye on the situation, but there was no reason to get overly excited, yet.

TomTom has made the next move, lending some credence to the Gutierrez's it's just between the two of us claims. On Monday, TomTom filed a countersuit in the US Court District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. TomTom alledges that Microsoft violated its intellectual property (though sources vary on the number of patents involved) in its Streets and Trips products.

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?

On previous occasions it's been mentioned that it takes very specific behaviors for the Free Software Foundation to file suit against a company for violating the GNU GPL license.

Today, the FSF let Cisco Systems know in no uncertain terms that line had been crossed. The complaint centers on the Linksys brand routers, and the firmware used on those products.

If you thought the RIAA had cornered the market on heavy-handed, misguided lawsuits, think again. TorrentFreak reports that the Societe civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF) plan on pursuing a lawsuit against three US-based companies that develop P2P applications. Vuze, LimeWire, and Shareaza are the applications targeted in the lawsuit. There is a fourth company named that's not a developer, or a P2P site -- it's a repository.

It's actually not just any repository. It is, for many, the repository for open source applications -- Sourceforge.

Over at Internetnews.com, Sean Michael Kerner points out an intriguing bit of information spotted at Groklaw indicating that SCO appears to be taking some steps toward reincorporating the Caldera International name. Insert copious amounts of wild speculation here.

SCO is currently restructuring, and truth be told, nobody knows what this filing for reincorporation truly means. Is SCO starting a new subsidiary? Is it trying to distance itself from its past? Is it going to deal in any way with Linux distribution development?

Legal news wire service Courthouse News reported recently that Reuters was suing the Commonwealth of Virginia because George Mason University was handing out its proprietary software. Nothing is ever that simple, is it?

George Mason University's Center for History and New Media distributes Zotero, an open source Firefox extension that helps users manage citations found on the web. It performs a similar function as Thomson Reuter's EndNote software. The lawsuit is based on the premise that Zotero's newest beta is able to convert the proprietary EndNote format to the open CSL (Citation Style Language) format. A lawsuit over a file format conversion?