It sounds pretty questionable to me, since the work from NCSA is dependent
on the prior art of libWWW and so forth from CERN; I don't think Mosaic was
the first GUI client (the CERN Next client comes to mind). So the main
innovations out of NCSA are inline images and forms: significant advances
from a WWW user viewpoint, but hardly original enough to patent (assuming
the law acts rationally ;).
What it might be referring to is the copyright on the Mosaic source code
and the trademark on the term "Mosaic".
This is not a new issue, or a threat given the track record of UIUC/NCSA so
far (pretty reasonable on mixed free/commercial development i.e. Eudora,
NCSA Telnet/ftp, the Spyglass spinoffs).
Let's look for a clarification before we panic...
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Albert Lunde Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu