A friend and co-worker from back when I worked on proprietary software has now seen the light and is writing Free software in his spare time instead.
Admittedly, software designed to produce correctly-formatted “apparatus” (citation footnotes and bibliography) for publications conforming to the Society for Biblical Literature’s SBL Handbook of Style: For Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Early Christian Studies is probably the epitome of ‘niche’, but I’m told the academic world is loving it. You’d be surprised how picky people can be about footnote formatting.
Isn’t this something that could be done (better?) with the Firefox extension Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/). It allows end users to define and contribute citation styles with a standard XML format (http://xbiblio.sourceforge.net/csl/) and has a very neat feature to export to Word (OOo coming soon).
Just a thought.
dave
Dave has missed the point of Free software. If there was actually a need to do this from scratch, it would be made and sold commercially by someone with a bit of nous and professionalism.