Technology licensing is the smartest approach for scientists or students to develop research prototypes, as well as for more seasoned companies who want to focus on the integration of MatrixBrowser into valuable commercial products. Licensing high-quality technology for a fair price often makes the whole difference between a brilliant idea that fades away with development difficulties and a groundbreaking title that hits the shelves with outrageous success.

That is the way MatrixBrowser creators understand the technology licensing issue.

The Competence Center Software Engineering and Interactive Systems at the

Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering is workgroup focusing on innovative visualization techniques as well as ambient intelligence system, which do a lot of work in the background, but in an unobtrusively way. But the user is always the center, where we start from. The MatrixBrowser Visualization Toolkit is intended as a generic API, where evelopers

can build various applications around like search interfaces, knowledge acquisition toolkits or semantic web systems. With this in mind, we have designed alternative ways of licensing Fly3D that trade the licensing fee for open-source freedom.

The MatrixBrowser Visualization Kit full software package, including the API and various tools with full source code, is available for use in a commercial product or application in conjunction with a collaboration or partnership with our institute (Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering / IAO).

• Full access to the licensee-restricted CVS repository, where the full version of the software is available for download;
• Customized special e-mail, instant message and telephone support.
• The rights to use MatrixBrowser Visualization Kit in one commercial product, without other payments or any kind of revenue share.

Additional services, like programming a new feature or on-site support, are not included in the license and can be arranged separately if requested by the licensee. The licensee is NOT allowed to sell, provide or publicly expose the MatrixBrowser Visualization Kit source code,

in part or as a whole, to anybody except the current employees of the licensee company.

Alternatively, MatrixBrowser Visualization Kit is also available for licensing under the GNU General Public License terms. The full description of the GPL system is available at the GPL website (http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html), but in short it means that the licensing company (Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering) will not charge any fees

for the intellectual property regarding the licensed software; it will provide the source code and other resources for free, and can only charge packing, distribution and transportation costs. The licensee, however, is obligated to provide the full source code of the product he develops with the licensed software to anybody who asks it, free of charge.

Christoph Kunz

Fraunhofer IAO

Nobelstrasse 12

70569 Stuttgart

Germany