One out of every two servers on the Net, including number one site Yahoo!, runs Apache. That adds up to several million servers. One of the reasons for this dominance is, of course, the quality of the product. But more important is the fact that on the Net, it is assumed that the best things in life are free. Apache does not charge a penny for its product, which is developed entirely by volunteer programmers, the last remnants of a once-proud race of free spirits who ruled the Net in its infancy. That was before Bill Gates came along, pinching pennies, insisting that nothing, not even information, was free, and spoiling all the fun.

Last week, even Apache went commercial, in a manner of speaking.Its software is still free, but IBM will be providing support to companies that use it. It will also help with development and charge for any new features it introduces. IBM is one of a whole shoal of big merchandisers who think it hurts to see a good resource just sitting around, not earning them any money.Is nothing sacred, you may well ask. The digital communications revolution was powered by freeware, after all. MS-DOS was never made for networked machines, which helps explain why Windows, which rides on it, in becoming ponderously larger with every release. It was UNIX which ran all the networks which finally merged to form the Internet. Until Windows NT came along, all flavours of this communications-friendly operating system were free. So were most of the basic applications that ran on it. In fact, a system of General Public Licences was created specifically to keep it free, in packages like Linux. Now, people want to make money off these.

On the other hand, is IBM muscle behind a free product allthat bad, so long as it leaves its core alone? Apache calculates that stronger branding and support will see their market share skyrocketing, attracting corporates who do not know too much about the Web and are therefore wary of free stuff.Whatever the merits of Apache's case, the fact remains that its precedent will start a gold rush on freeware. Already Freeware.com, for long the most popular repository of free stuff on the Web, has been absorbed by the giant Download.com. You go in there and search for your freeware. The process can, occasionally, be trying on the nerves. It is, presumably, designed to soften you up and make you more amenable to making a down payment.

The first targets of the gold rush, obviously, will be the huge Unix FTP archives maintained under the General Public Licence, which permits them to be used freely in the public domain so long as they are not altered and redistributed for profit. Between them, they hold all the software that even a large corporate might need to get intoelectronically mediated commerce.The next targets will be the client packages that an Internet user needs to install for basic services. It is already difficult to find a manually operable FTP or telnet client. Even most diallers run off scripts and cannot be manually controlled. Further `improvements' on these frippery like little bar graphs to display the state of your connection will see you paying a small sum to a big corporate.

The signs are out there: the sun is about to set on the old order of the online world. Information is no longer free and the very term `freeware' is headed for obsolescence. If you like the old ways, archive your freeware now and bury it in a nuclear bunker. It could, one day, be the last relic of a lost world.