Pros: free, collaborative (and works w/ diffferent programs on different platforms), somewhat more flexible (more fields which aren’t specific to a single record type), more powerful database on the backend.

Cons: more work to setup database/add entries/format bibliography.

I’ve been involved in those threads before. I still think the market sucks in general, at least for people on the social science and humanities end of the spectrum (me!), who often have to deal wih stuff like legal documents and archival manuscripts.

Bookends has a horrid GUI that is straight out of the 1980s, Sente — while promising — has a very limited data model, and BibTeX — while I respect a lot about the community that has grown around it — is as limited as one would expect of a system designed in the 1980s around TeX. The BibDesk group are working on some interesting things for v2 which could yield something useful.

In the grand schema of things, at this moment in time, these aren’t really options as far as I’m concerned. And I see no evidence that Mac productivity developers (including Apple) — with the possible exception of Omni — are thinking about the low-level details that will make the sort of improvements we need possible; or at least easier.

Now, OTOH, if we manage to improve the bib support in OpenOffice along the lines where we’re headed, then things start to get really interesting, because the improved support is not just there in the GUI app, but baked into the open file format.

http://www.macintouch.com/biblio.html