It will find a niche in the market and it may not be everything to everyone, just as Linux isn't everything to everyone. Open-source storage management software will have a place in the market, but is it something for everyone? That's not known yet.

Do you see any friction between the Aperi and SMI-S efforts? I know that there are a lot of people that like to see conflict in the industry because it makes the news. But the Aperi and SNIA groups have been in discussion for several months and we've talked about how this will all work out and what's the exact relationship that we need to ensure both groups are successful. Neither group wants to have competing standards out there in the market. That's why there's a commitment by Aperi to have SMI-S be the first major storage management specification out there achieve this mission and goal.

Even with SMI-S, there seems to be competition between SNIA members to be the first to implement it and all its functionality. Is that hurting internal collaboration? I don't want it to sound like it's an IBM/HP type of argument here. It's an industry philosophy that open source is about coding first and then -- once the code settles down -- trying to sift out of it what could be a specification. Then there's a different group in the industry that believes it's better to write the specification and then write the code to that. What you're hearing is different philosophies from one group of vendors who believe that, before you code to some type of capability and begin to adopt it, you should write it down as a specification and then code and test to it.

And you don't see vendors like Sun that make public statements against Aperi as a sign of friction between the groups? I'll have to defer to Sun to explain their position.

So you're still actively meeting with members of Aperi, even though it's now under Eclipse? We will be. We haven't met actively yet, but we've been meeting up to the week of their announcements. So we just haven't laid out a timetable.