Dear Terry,
Thanks for the note, and the interesting Zotero links.
I completely agree that Academia.com and Zotero are very different in design (structure/functionality) and in purpose. Hence Zotero might also work better to support an evolutionary process of building shared bibliographies that can be integrated into the workflow somehow. But, equally, for the same reasons Academia.com may be more appealing for an individual as a publishing platform, rather than as a working tool.
But I have not seen anywhere yet any indication that Zotero would be on track to be privatized, which is something you indicate as part of its design rationale. Instead, I find that the links you provide seem to communicate a strong drive to keep it open and non-commercial. Also I do not at all agree that "getting to the money faster" is the typical driving force of open source systems as you note. It may be to some, but our internet life is based on many open source systems that are driven by societal and pragmatic virtues of openness, and in many cases also by the bad experience of closed systems.
In the posts youo linked to, the author (a member of the Zotero development team) seems to be arguing that if people and especially institutions would understand the commercial logic, they would invest their money in non-commercial, FLOSS solutions, because they are more likely to get a fast evolutionary response to their needs, e.g. through the contributions from their external power users, and avoid lock-in - which are some of the points that I was concerned about. It seems to me that these blog posts give some evidence to support that point.
That means that an open platform such as Zotero might be more easily evolved towards a shared bibliography idea in the future by community efforts, even if it does not support it adequately in its current form.
cheers, kh
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On Feb 15, 2013, at 3:44 AM, Terence Love wrote:
> Open source appears to be morally sweet, yet closer inspection tends to
> indicate it is typically a furphy aimed at getting to the money faster
> (think Nasruddin and smuggling donkeys *). The amount of money gained in
> Zotero's future privatisation is leveraged by it being open-source now **.
>
> The design drivers of Mendeley appear to combine those of Academia.edu and
> Zotero; on one hand to increase uptake through improving individual users
> personal status and vanity ('I want to tell you about this a reference
> list that I've made and that I'm sharing with you!' ) and also the
> monetising of the data (all the reference data has to be stored on their
> servers). As Ken has pointed out, quality is an issue, and it looks like
> Mendeley has had problems with monetising its data due to quality issues
> ***.
>
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