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.