The deal was completed Tuesday, the company said in a news release. The terms of the acquisition were not released.

Widgets are small programs that can monitor topics online such as the weather, stock quotes or song lyrics -- and even display random quotes from the television series "The Simpsons" on demand.

The acquisition is the cornerstone of the Yahoo! Developer Network, an initiative to help software designers use Yahoo! products to build new applications and programs.

Konfabulator, which runs on both Windows and Mac platforms, previously charged a one-time fee of $20 for access to widgets created by their users and the code needed to design them. Yahoo! said in its release that it now will release the software for free, and give refunds for anyone who purchased the 2.0 version.

Toni Schneider, vice president of the Yahoo! Developer Network, said Konfabulator's strategy of giving software designers the tools to build on existing technology to create new products was similar to the goal behind the Developer Network.

The Developer Network is part of a "new wave of innovation on the Web where people are taking bits and pieces of various applications on the web and remixing them," Schneider told United Press International.

Other third-party designers also will benefit from the acquisition by Yahoo! of Konfabulator.

Joshua Keay, president of Monkey Business Labs in New York City, a company that designs widgets for use with Dashboard, called the agreement between Konfabulator and Yahoo! a vast opportunity.

"It brings a lot more users into the fold. It will definitely raise awareness. It will definitely increase the user base," Keay told UPI.

Widgets running on Windows, Keay said, present new challenges, particularly with security. Apple's operating system has no spyware and very few viruses, whereas "the current Windows environment has so much shareware but so much bad shareware and most people are afraid of downloading because of spyware."

Security is a particular concern with program like Konfabulator, he said, because they provide tools to build an application, but they cannot prevent a software designer from creating malicious programs.

Last summer, a year after Konfabulator's inception, Apple released Dashboard with its recent operating system, Tiger OS X 10.4. Keay explained that 10 basic widgets designed by Apple are shipped with machines that run Tiger, and users have the option to download more by using Dashboard.

The similarity between Konfabulator and Dashboard provoked complaints in software magazines, blogs and messages boards from Konfabulator users that Apple had copied the product, but a programmer and widget designer, who goes by the name, Stephan.com, said Apple has not committed any serious offence.

"Did Apple steal from Konfabulator? Well, maybe," he told UPI, "but they did so much of a better job of it. It might have been nice if Apple had bought out the company, but Konfabulator was already going cross-platform and Apple already had the same thing way back in 1984 -- they called them desk accessories."

Ina Fried, a senior writer Cnet.com, an online technology magazine, said although Dashboard and Konfabulator "do functionally the same thing," Konfabulator is still ahead of the game, because Apple users constitute a very small portion of the market.

"They went from being a $20 product from a small independent developer to being a free part of Yahoo! which has a pretty wide reach," Fried told UPI. "It could introduce a lot of Windows users to the idea."

Apple declined UPI's request for comment.

The widget market is still divided between designers who release their creations for free and those who charge, and Konfabulator's expanding audience could make it difficult for designers to charge for widgets in the future, but Schneider said that by eliminating the fee to download Konfabulator's product, Yahoo! will be able to tap a valuable source of talented developers and find a new audience by linking widgets to Yahoo! sites.

"The same business models that apply on the Web today will apply to these services ... ads, driving premium services," Schneider said. "We're not thinking of it as a way to put ads in front of people's desktops. We're thinking (of it) as a way to (drive) them back into our network."

Anne Pessala is an intern for UPI Science News

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