The days of selling software through the traditional commercial model are numbered, as open source is becoming the paradigm of choice, said Greg Stein, chairman of the apache software foundation, at the EclipseCon 2006 conference on Wednesday.

Software becoming is increasingly commoditized, Stein said during his keynote presentation, and more of it is available free and it is easy to get.

"As the [open source] stack grows and grows and takes over more areas, there's less money available in packaged products," Stein said."All of your software [will be] free. It means that over time, you aren't going to be paying for software anymore" but will instead pay for assistance with it, Stein said.He estimated that in five to 10 years, most software used today will be free."The notion of packaged product is really going to kind of go away," Stein said.

In comparing Eclipse and Apache, Stein said Eclipse looked at the Apache model when being founded. Like Apache, which started with a Web server, Eclipse has expanded beyond its original mission, now being more than just an IDE. But Eclipse has paid staff while Apache is all-volunteer, said Stein."Our organizations [have] not been very close, but certainly, we're starting to see more cooperation between them" Stein said.

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Prashanth Rai