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On Sun, 30 Apr 1995, Jeremy Allaire wrote:

> 
> 
> < all of the Spyglass licensees, right?  So Spry, et al. get to build 
> their subsequent commercial browsers out of this code.>>
> 
> I don't think this is the case.  Spyglass more or less liscensed the 
> name, not the code, though they do/did have access to the code.  
> Spyglass re-wrote the entire application, deciding that the original 
> Mosaic code was too slow and buggy, etc. > 

This has been going on since the invention of the General Public 
License!  Spyglass will have to re-engineer their tweaks to support the 
new tweaks from the "Unsupported" software.  In 2-3 months, there will be 
upgrades available in retail stores.  Meanwhile, you get new Mosaic now!

Of course, Chimera, Cello, and WinWEB will be coming out with their 
upgrades too, based on the new user contributed enhancements to Mosaic.
It pays to give 30,000 engineers and computer students source code!

> I don't think you'll see ANY of the innovations or capabilities used in
> commercial Mosaic's.  The process of coordinating application development 
> and using or re-using code is far too complicated and costly.  I think 
> you'll see different products, all internally developed, by 
> Spry/Spyglass, etc. > 

Guess again!  AT&T "Commercialised" Sys3 UNIX and had to fold in BSD 4.1 
enhancements for Sys5, by the time SysVr4 rolled out, AT&T had "adopted" 
about 90% of the Berkely functionality.

Sun gave up and just put SunOS features and toolkits under GPL and 
included it in the public archives.  GPL software gets updated every 2-3 
months.  I'm planning on contributing a few httpd/mosiac enhancments to 
support on-line vending.  Unless NetScape releases "Secure Sockets" 
source code, we'll have two competing standards.  One supported by 2500 
engineers and vendors, the other supported by 4 full-time developers who 
are also supporting everything else.

> The ironic thing is that when Mosaic went commercial (e.g. liscensed to 
> Spyglass), the Web community was in an uproar about how the freeware 
> product would be abandond which then forced Spyglass to promise to give 
> their code back to NCSA Mosaic.  So now we have NCSA Mosaic innovating 
> well beyond what the fools at Spyglass can even approach and folks 
> asking for Mosaic back or at least to have the functionality included 
> in the commercial releases.  So humorous. > 
> Best,

Spyglass will do exactly what Sun, IBM, HP, and DEC do.  They will 
negotiate terms for the "binaries only" flavor, tweak it up (probably 
returning the enhancements to NCSA this time), and release the "Newest" 
flavor as a "Revolutionary New Product", 6-12 months from now :-).

They may even pull a "Microsoft", and announce a "better than ever" 
version which will get a lot of press and advertizing, and when the 
release comes out, it will be inferiour to the GPL release you can get 
off the internet next month.

	Rex Ballard


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Tue May  2 19:50:49 1995