Caveat Lector

Dear Thomson Reuters,

I only became a Zotero convert quite recently. Admittedly, this is odd, since I formerly worked for George Mason University, and I had the privilege to see Zotero in pre-alpha stage and was wowed by it even then. It’s only recently, though, that I have been writing enough professionally to make a citation manager worthwhile. Zotero does what I need it to (except for translating Emerald’s web pages into citations, and I could rectify that problem myself if I chose). It will shortly do many things that I want it to. It’s good software. I like it.

You are suing a product I like. I’m a librarian. I have influence over other librarians, and (occasionally) over faculty and students. Does this truly strike you as a wise move? Truly?

I’ll let other people, those with more legal savvy than I, opine about the merits of your case. I just want to make clear to you a potentially serious consequence of your actions, no matter what happens in court.

We’re developing a piece of software locally that is, among other things, a citation database, one we envision both importing into and exporting from. We’re having a lengthy meeting about it today and tomorrow, in fact. As soon as news of your lawsuit crossed the transom, an email went out from one of our devs saying “Um… importing/exporting with EndNote could be a potentially fatal idea.”

Do you see, Thomson Reuters? Do you see? If you don’t settle this nonsense in a fashion that leaves Zotero intact, the open-source software development world will fear to interoperate with you. If EndNote isn’t already dead, this will kill it, because our little project is hardly the only one of its type. We are legion, and you have shut yourself away from us. You have no one to blame for this suicidal course but your own legal and executive team.

And if you take away Zotero, trust me, Thomson Reuters: it won’t be EndNote that I switch to.