Spinnaker Software

About Us

Spinnaker Software is a small company located in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. It was founded by David Coppit in June of 1999 to support development of open source software in general, and News Clipper in particular.

The company is based on the notion that open source software provides high levels of reliability, faster development, lower overhead, and closer customer relations. However, people such as John Ousterhout of Scriptics Corp. have noted that "Free Software Needs Profit" in order to bridge the gap between the needs addressed by the developers and the risk averse needs of mainstream users. In particular, it needs better documentation, tutorials, professional support, usability engineering, easier installation, etc. (Also see Frank Hecker's paper, "Setting Up Shop: The Business of Open-Source Software".)

Our mission is to address the needs of the average risk-averse user, while continuing to develop innovative and robust open source software. Revenues earned through sales of commercial versions and support of open source software aid the development of "less interesting" aspects such as documentation and product "bells and whistles". We believe that through such an approach, both open source and commercial communities benefit.

New Clipper

News Clipper is Spinnaker Software's flagship product. News Clipper allows web developers to integrate dynamic information from the internet, such as headlines and stock quotes  into their own web pages in their own style. This allows pages to draw more visitors as the information changes hourly. News Clipper natively supports over 200 news sources, and also supports Netscapes RDF format for news headlines, which effectively adds over 200 more information sources.

News Clipper's information gathering, filtering, and formatting capabilities can be extended through the addition of "handlers". For example, a web developer can add a new information source to News Clipper by writing a handler for it using the MakeHandler utility.

News Clipper is, and will remain, Open Source software. The source code is freely available under the terms of the GNU Public License. Spinnaker Software earns revenue through the sale of a commercial version that includes pre-compiled binaries, documentation, streamlined installation, and technical support. In addition, Spinnaker Software offers services related to News Clipper, such as installation help, customization of the product, custom handler writing, web page development with the product, etc. In the long term, software "extras" will be offered, like a graphical configuration management tool, a graphical front-end to the software, a graphical version of MakeHandler, and a handler browser.

For more information, visit the News Clipper home page.