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I don't think that will happen - or not completely. The decision whether to make a mud commercial or not does not have much to do with the quality of the mud or the effort that went into it. At the present moment, you can find free muds that are equally good or better than the commercial ones. It's becoming more and more demanding to make a competitive mud as player expectations rise, true, but there'll always be obsessive fools willing to do it all for free. (Even some commercial muds don't pay their staff, which is a concept that boggles my mind.)
The number of commercial muds is not rising that fast either. Diku (and derivatives) remains the codebase of choice for the vast majority of muds, the codebases that allow commercial use are nowhere near as popular, and not many people are willing to invest real money (*gasp*) into having a custom codebase made the way IRE did, or have the skill to make their own.
Unless we see an unexpected rise in popularity of publicly available codebases that can be used for profit, I don't see it happening.
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