                    MOSAIC                    
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August 29, 1994

Spyglass to commercialize future Mosaic versions

By Ellis Booker

All future "commercialized" versions of Mosaic, the wildly popular graphical viewer for the Internet, will be developed and distributed by Spyglass, Inc. under a master license agreement signed with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign lastweek

The university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) first put the Unix version of Mosaic on the Internet in January of last year. The deal last week was an expansion of a multi-million-dollar joint development and licensing agreement the university signed in May with Spyglass, a Savoy, Ill., company formed by ex-NCSA developers in 1990 to enhance and commercialize NCSA technologies.

The NCSA said it believes there are more than 2 million copies of Mosaic in use. Another 30,000 to 50,000 copies of the viewer are downloaded each month from Internet servers. Mosaic allows users to access some 3,000 graphical multimedia databases.

"With the overwhelming demand for commercial versions of Mosaie, our distribution system needs to be dramatically strengthened," said Larry Smarr, director of NCSA.

Stable, standard

Spyglass President Douglas Colbeth said the benefit of a commercial version of the viewer, dubbed Enhanced NCSA Mosaic, would be a "stable and standard" product across multiple computer platforms. This would make computer and software vendors more receptive to bundling the product with their systems, Colbeth claimed.

He predicted that there would be more than 20 million copies of Spyglass' Mosaic within a year.

Future improvements planned for the Spyglass implementation will be featured aimed at supporting electronic commerce across the internet. Those iclude improved security, secure payment processing and integration with other software applications through support for tools such as Microsoft Corp.'s Object Linking and Embedding 2.0 and Apple Computer. Inc. 's AppleEvents.

Public history

The commercialization of applications and protocols first seen and freely distributed on the Internet has a long history, according to Tony Rutkowski, executive director of the Internet Society in Reston, Va.

"What's nice is the fact that part of the tradition has been to maintain the public version," he said.

Indeed, NCSA's Mosaic will continue to be available as a "free with copyright" product, meaning that anyone can download it from the Internet for individual use.

"We'll continue to support and enhance the public version," stressed Joseph Hardin, associate director at the NCSA's Software Development Group. He added that part of the agreement with Spyglass calls for technology sharing between the two parties.

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