If they were something more, it would speak to horrible redundancy in the templates & would raise warning flags of possible arbitrary code execution exploits. It would also speak to major problems with EndNote’s style editor, which has significant limitations (e.g. inability to re-write fields).

Their claim, if true, would be good for their case. But I doubt they’d make this same claim if they were talking to security-minded IT at institutions where they were trying to sell their software.

On reading the quote again, I’m relying for my interpretation on some other commentary by an EndNote person that I discussed earlier. So while you’re probably right that I may be reading too much into (or wrongly reading) the above quote, I don’t think I’m wrong in my basic interpretation. While I’m no expert on binary file formats, I think these files are pretty basic templates, not conceptually significantly different than the XML CSL styles.

A more appropriate analogy to what Thompson Reuters said would be akin to Zotoro reverse engineering a Virtual Machine. The claim by Thompson Reuters is that the Endnote application contains a VM and the style files are the compiled byte code that is run by the VM. Obvious parallels to Java, .NET, Basic and Forth.

I’m not arguing whether Thompson Reuters stance against Zotoro is appropriate or not, just that the analogy you used is not a reflection, IMHO, of the quote from Thompson Reuters.