Ads by TechWords

See your link here
Receive the latest technology news and information.
Computerworld Daily News (First Look and Wrap-Up)
Computerworld Blogs Newsletter
The Weekly Top 10
Cloud Computing
View all newsletters




Privacy Policy
 

Apache's Greg Stein says commercial software's days are numbered

Instead, we'll be paying for software support in the years ahead, he says

March 23, 2006 12:00 PM ET

InfoWorld - The days of selling software through the traditional commercial model are numbered, as open-source becomes the preferred choice, Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, said at the EclipseCon 2006 conference yesterday.

Software is becoming increasingly commoditized, he said during a keynote presentation, and more of it is available at no charge, and it is easy to get. He cited the OpenOffice office automation package as an example of free software that can replace Microsoft Office.

"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.

The shift could take an estimated five to 10 years, he said. "The notion of [a] packaged product is really going to kind of go away," Stein said.

Eventually, a free software project will overtake a commercial effort in functionality; there are almost always more developers in the open-source community, Stein pointed out.

Making money in software will involve selling assistance services for functions such as installation, configuration, maintenance, upgrading, testing and customization, Stein said. Basic software components themselves will be free, he said.

"As our systems grow more and more complex, more and more assistance is necessary," he said.

An audience member was not so willing to concede the software market to open-source. "I think there's always going to be a spot for commercial, closed-source for specialized tasks, but the base infrastructure will be more open-source or easily available," said Danny D'Amours, computer systems officer at the National Research Council.

Commercial, closed-source software will not go away "because there's so many small niches that people will be able to exploit or be able to make commercial solutions off of," D'Amours said.

In other parts of his presentation, Stein discussed the evolution of software licensing and compared Apache to Eclipse. "A license can ruin a perfectly good piece of software," Stein said, borrowing a quote from fellow Apache participant Jon Stevens. "A bad license can make it so restrictive that nobody wants to use [the software]."

Licensing has taken various forms, ranging from the traditional proprietary license used by Microsoft Corp., IBM, and Oracle Corp. to Microsoft's somewhat less-restrictive Shared Source license and the all-access GNU General Public License (GPL), which has caused problems, Stein said.

"The GPL is sometimes considered viral in that it grows out to the entire software package" and requires the release of all code affected by it, he said.


Reprinted with permission from

For more enterprise computing news, visit Infoworld.com
Story copyright 2006 InfoWorld Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Jump to comments

Software

Additional Resources

EFD vs. HDD - What You Need to Know
WHITE PAPER
Enterprise flash drives provide a new Tier 0 storage layer capable of delivering high I/O performance at a very low latency. Proper use of EFDs in an Oracle environment can deliver increased performance compared to fibre channel drives. Read the recommendations for identification of the best DB components for EFDs.
Gartner Research Report: Magic Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers, 2009
WHITE PAPER
The market for products to improve the delivery of application software over networks remains dynamic and innovative. Vendors focused on solving enterprises' most-pressing application problems have become the top players.
Eight Criteria for Server Load Balancing
WHITE PAPER
Server load balancers are a simple yet highly effective means to scale an application environment while ensuring its availability. Today's solutions should also address application performance and security. Read about the top eight criteria you should consider when choosing a server load balancer and how Citrix NetScaler meets those requirements.

IT Jobs