But it still doesn't sound like you're working in conjunction with Aperi to help develop its open-source software. Is that true? It's been stated by Aperi that if they come up with new extensions to SMI-S or new interfaces that are specific to storage, they'd bring that to SNIA for consideration for technical specification standards work to get started around that. There's a lot of ifs and wills in what I'm saying. Until SNIA has a document in hand, it can only talk in the future tense.

You mentioned Aperi is working on a couple different components with SNIA, but how much of a real joint effort is this? Is this really just unilateral effort by Aperi? First of all, they are all speaking with SNIA. You're looking at a group of companies that are already members of SNIA and that are also members of the Aperi group. These are all companies that have current implementations of SMI-S. Most of these companies have made very strong contributions to SMI-S specification work.

What changes here? Instead of each company's engineering department building its own implementation of SMI-S..., they want to build it as a collective community of companies and somehow consume that into their product lines and offer that back to the industry. [Some believe] through open source that you can get more functionality coded up and available faster [as a group] than any one company could do it.

So has SNIA started working on any software implementations of SMI-S itself? The answer is no. It's been working on specification work to date. There's a plain intent to have a relationship with the Eclipse foundation, specifically the Aperi group, so that there's a cohesive, bilateral movement of information about the SMI-S specification back and forth between the groups.

How is Aperi's work going to help the user in the long run? That's a tough one to assess. It's all going to be based on what vendors make a business model around. You could say, 'What value has Red Hat brought to the market versus what value has SUSE brought to the market, versus what did they both bring that's different from what HP or IBM bring with AIX or HP-UX?' Is it price? Is it functionality? Is it capability? Is it high-end? Is it low-end?