"I think there's always going to b 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]," Stein said.