The world’s largest manufacturer of personal-computer software has announced it will use an Internet browsing tool developed at the University of Illinois in its new products.
Microsoft Corporation, the manufacturer, decided to license “Mosaic” software developed at the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications because it best fit the company’s existing technology and had “the most mileage” of the products under consideration, a spokeswoman said.
Financial terms were not disclosed, but the company that markets and licenses Mosaic for the university, Spyglass Inc., said that the deal would be a money maker for Illinois. The institution shares in all royalties on Mosaic licenses.
Developed two years ago, Mosaic is software that allows Internet users to retrieve text and images from information sources arranged as pages on the World-Wide Web. To do that, the users click a mouse on highlighted words or phrases.
Promoters of the World-Wide Web format said the significance of the Microsoft deal extended beyond its impact on Illinois.
Now “there’s less likelihood that Microsoft will develop its own proprietary standard” for navigating the Internet, said Albert Vezza, an organizer of the World-Wide Web Consortium and associate director of the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The consortium is an industry-sponsored group at M.I.T. working to develop common standards for the World-Wide Web format.
Microsoft’s deal allows the company to use both the non-commercial version of the software, called “NCSA Mosaic,” and the commercial version marketed by Spyglass, which is called “Enhanced NCSA Mosaic.”
A spokeswoman for Microsoft said the company expected to incorporate Mosaic in its planned on-line service, Microsoft Network, and eventually into software such as the much-anticipated “Windows 95" operating system, which is scheduled to be released in August. Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash., has sold 60 million copies of previous versions of Windows, making it the most popular system on the market today. Windows enables computer users to run software in a point-and-click fashion on I.B.M.-compatible machines.
Initial versions of Windows 95 probably will not contain Mosaic, the Microsoft spokeswoman said, but the product will be designed to work with copies of Mosaic that owners can obtain through the Internet from the supercomputing center or other sources.
Under the deal, Microsoft can employ Mosaic in any product, but the company has not indicated how extensively it plans to use it.
“It’s great for the university,” said Douglas P. Colbeth, president of Spyglass, which is based in Naperville, Ill. Besides the financial benefits, “the university is now getting the spotlight it deserves.”
More than 15 million copies of Mosaic have already been licensed to software publishers and computer manufacturers, Mr. Colbeth said.
Larry Smarr, director of the supercomputing center, said the arrangement would also be a boon to the center. As an offshoot of the deal, the center and Microsoft will collaborate on new protocols and standards for the Internet and, possibly, on technical issues related to the development of digital libraries, Mr. Smarr said.
Microsoft has not said whether or not it plans to become one of the center’s industrial partners, who collectively now provide about $4-million of its $30-million annual budget. But Mr. Smarr said money was not the point.
“This agreement will not make a great deal of difference to N.C.S.A. financially,” he said. “But it will make a great deal of difference in software development.”