I'd ask this on comp.infosystems.www.misc, but most of the people whose
opinions I want to hear don't read those newsgroups anymore, and this
seems more than slightly relevant.
I feel like Richard Stallman's sold GNU to Sun.
Brian
---------- Forwarded message ----------
For Immediate Release
Contacts: Sue Sherman Janice Brown, (617) 332-8066
Spyglass, Inc. Janice Brown and Associates, =
Inc.
(217) 355-6000, x. 223 (for Spyglass, Inc.)
Chris Zollars
NCSA
(217) 244-3049
University of Illinois Assigns All Future Commercial
Licensing Rights for NCSA Mosaic to Spyglass, Inc.
IBM, FTP Software, O'Reilly and Associates and Firefox Will Distribute
Enhanced NCSA Mosaic from Spyglass to Their Customers
SAVOY, Ill., Aug. 24 -- To better meet the strong market demand for
easy-to-use Internet access tools, Spyglass, Inc., and the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign today announced a master-license agreement
assigning to Spyglass all future commercial licensing rights for the
University's NCSA Mosaic=81 graphical Internet browser. Spyglass develops
and distributes commercially enhanced versions of Mosaic for Windows,
Macintosh and UNIX computers. Spyglass licenses its Enhanced NCSA Mosaic
to networking software companies, systems vendors and online service
providers for incorporation into their products and services.
Spyglass today also announced that it has formed relationships with
IBM's Networking Software Division of Research Triangle Park, N.C.; FTP
Software, Inc., of North Andover, Mass.; O'Reilly and Associates, Inc., of
Sebastopol, Calif.; and Firefox, Inc., of San Jose, Calif. Additional
relationships will be announced within the next 30 days. Since becoming a
commercial licensee of NCSA Mosaic in May, Spyglass has licensed a total of
more than 5 million copies of its Enhanced NCSA Mosaic to these companies
and others, who are integrating it into their products for distribution to
end-users.
NCSA Mosaic is the most popular graphical browser for the Internet.
More than two million copies of Mosaic are in use, and an additional
30,000 copies are being downloaded each month from the Internet. NCSA
Mosaic was developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mosaic gives
users point-and-click access to the World Wide Web, an information
retrieval system on the Internet with more than 3,000 graphical, multimedia
databases of "hyperlinked" documents. The Internet is a vast
"supernetwork" of public and private networks connecting thousands of
organizations and an estimated 30 million individual users. New users are
joining the Internet at the rate of more than one million each month, and
hundreds of new WWW servers are coming online each month. Because of the
reach of the Internet, it offers an attractive vehicle for electronic
publishing and for conducting business globally.
Expanded Distribution and Enhancements for Mosaic
The new University of Illinois - Spyglass agreement will create a
broader, more practical distribution channel for commercial versions of
NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic traditionally has been available in two ways:
for free with copyright to individual users, who must download it from the
Internet; and through a limited number of commercial licensees.
"With the overwhelming demand for commercial versions of Mosaic,
our distribution system needs to be dramatically strengthened," said Larry
Smarr, director of NCSA. "Now, working with Spyglass, we'll be able to get
Mosaic to everyone who wants it much more quickly -- largely by mobilizing
lots of vendors who will integrate, add value to and incorporate Enhanced
NCSA Mosaic with their products for distribution to their customers. We
believe that this arrangement will free up NCSA developers to work on
adding new leading-edge capabilities to NCSA Mosaic."
"This new agreement solves the problem of getting solid,
commercial-quality copies of Mosaic to the tens of millions of people who
want to tap the rich resources of the World Wide Web and the Internet,"
said Douglas Colbeth, president of Spyglass. "It will give vendors stable,
standard and feature-rich versions of Enhanced NCSA Mosaic that they can
incorporate immediately into their products -- with little or no additional
development work, if they so choose. Our ultimate goal is to have people
automatically receive Enhanced NCSA Mosaic as a standard part of their
computer systems, networking software, and commercial online services. By
this time next year, there should be more than 20 million copies of
Enhanced NCSA Mosaic from Spyglass in use on desktops."
According to Joseph Hardin, associate director of NCSA's software
development group, Spyglass is the right partner for NCSA. The company
has:
* a proven track record in commercializing NCSA technologies;
* demonstrated the ability to deliver commercially enhanced versions of
Mosaic for multiple platforms: Windows, Macintosh and X Windows/UNIX;
* made a number of impressive improvements to NCSA Mosaic;
* established an open licensing program for Enhanced NCSA Mosaic that
supports NCSA's philosophy of open access to Mosaic;
* established impressive product plans for the future;
* begun development on the next generation of Enhanced NCSA Mosaic;
* made a substantial financial commitment to the University of Illinois and
NCSA, helping enable NCSA to continue leading-edge development of Mosaic;
and
* committed to provide improvements for inclusion in the
public-with-copyright version.
The University of Illinois will honor all agreements with current
commercial licensees, but will be referring inquiries about all future
commercial licenses to Spyglass and encouraging current licensees to work
with Spyglass. Because Spyglass has committed to license very high volumes
of Mosaic licenses from the University, the company can offer Enhanced
NCSA Mosaic to current and future Mosaic licensees at very favorable terms.
The new University of Illinois - Spyglass agreement is an extension
of a multimillion-dollar joint development and licensing agreement signed
in May. Under the new agreement, NCSA will now focus on research into
advanced features for the next generations of Mosaic, such as voice
recognition, full-motion video, and intelligent agents for searching on the
Internet. Spyglass will develop and bring to market commercially enhanced
versions of NCSA Mosaic, focusing on large-volume sales to other vendors.
NCSA will continue to offer a public-with-copyright version of
Mosaic over the Internet, which individuals can download for free. As part
of its agreement with NCSA, Spyglass will provide a number of its
improvements to NCSA for incorporation back into the public-with-copyright
version.
In addition to collaborating on Mosaic, NCSA and Spyglass are
working with the new consortium formed by MIT and CERN to drive new
standards and advancements for the World Wide Web.
Licensing Partners Plan Multiple Uses
IBM's family of TCP/IP products provides a comprehensive set of
applications to meet the interoperability and connectivity needs of
business and home users. By integrating Enhanced NCSA Mosaic from Spyglass
with IBM's TCP/IP application suite, IBM will provide users with leading
graphical facilities for accessing and navigating the Internet.
FTP Software, the leader in TCP/IP internetworking software,
develops products that combine the simplicity of workgroup TCP/IP software
with the sophistication and high-end features of enterprise environments.
=46TP Software plans to incorporate Mosaic technology in future products.
Considered the pioneering developer of TCP/IP technology for personal
computers, FTP Software provides solutions to a wide range of customers in
a variety of industries, including financial, telecommunications, medical
and government.
O'Reilly and Associates is the leading publisher of books about the
Internet and developer of Global Network Navigator (GNN), an Internet
publishing platform with links to more than 650 information servers on the
Internet. O'Reilly has licensed Enhanced NCSA Mosaic from Spyglass and
will bundle the software with The Mosaic Handbook, which will be published
in three editions for the Windows, Macintosh and X Window System platforms
and be in bookstores in the Fall. O'Reilly's Digital Media Group will
distribute Enhanced NCSA Mosaic to GNN users who want to use a solid,
commercially supported version of Mosaic. The Digital Media Group will
also license Mosaic to other digital publishers who are building
Internet-based information products and services.
Firefox Corporation, Ltd., the leading provider of server-based
TCP/IP communications services for use in Novell's NetWare environments,
plans to provide Enhanced NCSA Mosaic as an integral part of its expanded
NOVIX product line. The unique design of NOVIX enhances NetWare by
centralizing the administration, management and security of TCP/IP
communications and access at the NetWare server. Firefox products are
available worldwide through Novell resellers.
Enhanced NCSA Mosaic
Enhanced NCSA Mosaic Release 1.0 features a number of improvements
and enhancements requested by the Internet community, including:
* reliability;
* feature-matched versions across all three desktop platforms;
* dramatically faster performance;
* user interface improvements, to conform with industry standards;
* reduced memory requirements -- the software now runs in one-half to
one-third the memory previously required;
* easy installation;
* support for multiple windows;
* printing;
* forms support -- for enhanced two-way communication between users and Web
servers;
* proxy gateway support -- for security in networked environments; and
* an online Help system (HTML format)
Subsequent releases of Enhanced NCSA Mosaic from Spyglass will
include features enabling Mosaic and the World Wide Web to be used for more
sophisticated electronic publishing as well as electronic commerce.
Release 2.0 will include an enhanced security and authentication framework
and viewers for the most popular document, image, and audio file formats.
=46uture enhancements will include additional multimedia support,
interoperability with other applications using standards such as OLE 2.0
and AppleEvents, and full and secure payment-processing capabilities and
other features for true electronic commerce on the Internet.
For more information about Enhanced NCSA from Spyglass, prospective
licensees may contact Spyglass at (217) 355-6000 or mosaic@spyglass.com.
Additional information about Spyglass and Enhanced NCSA Mosaic is available
on Spyglass' Web server, http:\\www.spyglass.com.
NCSA
NCSA, a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is
dedicated to advancing high-performance computing and communications for
computational science and engineering in academia and industry. The center
is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Advanced Research
Projects Agency, corporate partners, and the State of Illinois.
Spyglass, Inc.
In addition to being the leading provider of commercially enhanced
versions of Mosaic, Spyglass, Inc. is the leading developer of visual data
analysis tools for the engineering and scientific marketplace, which run on
Windows, Macintosh and UNIX computers. Tim Krauskopf, developer of NCSA
Telnet, and others formed Spyglass in 1990 to commercialize technology from
NCSA. The company's venture-capital partners include Greylock Management
of Boston, Mass. and Venrock Associates of New York City.
###
August 1994
NCSA Mosaic is a trademark of the University of Illinois. Spyglass is a
registered trademark of Spyglass, Inc. All other brands or products are
trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should
be treated as such.
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
Andrew Busey Spyglass, Inc.
Spyglass Mosaic 1800 Woodfield Drive
Product Manager Savoy, IL 61874
busey@spyglass.com (217)355-6000 x248=20