George Mason University has issued a statement regarding the Thomson Reuters Zotero lawsuit.
Here's an excerpt from the statement:
The Thomson Reuters Corporation has sued the Commonwealth of Virginia over Zotero, a project based at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). A free and open-source software initiative, Zotero aims to create the world’s best research tool and has already been adopted by hundreds of thousands of users at countless colleges and research universities. CHNM announces that it has re-released the full functionality of Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview to its users and the open source community.
As part of its formal response to this legal action, Mason will also not renew its site license for EndNote. As academics themselves, the creators of the Zotero project strive to serve the scholarly community and to respond to its needs in an age of digital research. In line with that simple goal, they maintain that anything created by users of Zotero belongs to those users, and that it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction. CHNM concurs with the journal Nature, which recently editorialized about this matter: "The virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating."
CHNM remains committed to the openness it has promoted since its founding at Mason in 1994 and to the freedoms of users of its websites and software. Its ambitious development cycle and plans for Zotero’s future remain unchanged.
Read more about it at "Company's Lawsuit Over Free Scholarly Organization Tool Generates Buzz" and "Reuters Says George Mason University Is Handing Out Its Proprietary Software."
A statement issued by Thomson Reuters can be read here.
http://www.thomsonreuters.com/content/press_room/sci/297063