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A L S O__T O D A Y

21st briefing
By Scott Rosenberg
Feds 1, Microsoft 0 -- but the game's only started

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T A B L E__T A L K

Does spelling matter in cyberspace? Come to Table Talk's Digital Cul ture area and add your voice.

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Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
Drudge falls for Yahoo hackers' nonsense
(12/11/97)

The girl-game jinx
By Elizabeth Weil
Can selling computer games to girls be reduced to a science?
(12/10/97)

E.D., phone home!
By Scott Rosenberg
Esther Dyson talks about Microsoft, the Net, Russia and more
(12/09/97)

Technocracy in America
By Andrew Leonard
A review of "Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century" by G. Pascal Zachary
(12/08/97)

The 21st Challenge
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
Take the 21st Challenge: Rename software! Win prizes!
(12/05/97)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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L I C E N S E_T O_code___

BY GREG LINDSAY | Many of the technologies that make the Net go round -- from the arcane details of routing protocols to the Web browsers we use every day -- were hatched at universities and bestowed on the world largely for free. But as universities struggle to find their place in the anarchic digital marketplace, they're getting serious about trying to cash in.

For a look at how, pay a visit to Team Habanero. Ensconced at the University of Illinois in a linked series of offices packed with a cornucopia of Windows NT, Sun and SGI workstations, these front-line researchers of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois have just unveiled their software baby -- a Java-based product called Habanero.

Habanero promises its users the ability to create and view documents, chat, throw in some graphics and change the documents, all in real time and -- thanks to the "write once, run anywhere" principle -- from any machine. Habanero is intended to be the cornerstone of the next generation of collaborative groupware (think Lotus Notes). And yes, it's for sale.

Or, to be more precise, it's up for licensing. If you only want to use it -- say you and your boss want to haggle over a memo together -- then just head to Habanero's home page and download a free copy, which is currently available for UNIX, Windows and the Mac. If you're more interested in borrowing its source code to use as the foundation for your own new product -- a kind of "Habanero Plus" -- the NCSA is still more than willing to accommodate you. Just drop by the Web site, sign a few forms and voilà! You're only a few phone calls and lawyers' fees away from owning some advanced technology of your very own.

University-funded software projects like Habanero have become the middle ground between free software movement programs like Apache and Linux, with their traditions of full source-code disclosure, and commercial software, where the code is usually held under lock and key. You can use programs like Habanero for free, but their ivory-tower owners will only hand over the key if you're willing to promise royalty fees. Most of these projects are the result of collaborations between senior researchers, who often have real-world projects under their belts, and talented students, who hope to go professional themselves someday.

Since researchers don't have to worry about end users, they often create software that's buggy, weak on interface design and intended primarily for researchers -- the people who wrote it in the first place. But at the same time, the increasing complexity of the software means the old strategy of just dumping half-finished programs on a server (as the NCSA did with Mosaic, the original Web browser) just doesn't cut it anymore.

"Universities are at a crossroads," says Karen Hersey, the president-elect of the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) . "They have to decide what is the best way to distribute their software. Should it be put on a server and be distributed via FTP for free, or should the university look at the commercial potential?"

"Most often," added Hersey, the MIT intellectual property counsel, "it just can't be distributed at will. [The software] is too complex. It needs maintenance. It needs documentation. It needs someone who understands the software. What you're talking about here is a totally different type of software than, say, shareware; a type with commercial value, but also a type that demands this kind of maintenance. If you just distribute that from an FTP server, then no one will know how to use it, it will lose credibility and will eventually be thrown away."

N E X T_P A G E | It's time to make some money