However, people do add databases. I often hear from customers, "I have enough Oracle. I don't need any more Oracle." That's where we come in. We have always had the lowest TCO [total cost of ownership] database on the market. Always. And we maintain that leadership.

Are you cost-competitive with the open-source databases? Open source is just another business model: Get as many users on your free offering and convert that into paid support. That business model has been co-opted by the larger vendors, including us. We have Sybase ASE Express Edition. It is better than MySQL, better than Ingres. We have had 45,000 downloads of Express, and a lot of that converted into business.

I had one big customer call and thank us for making Express free. He had a lot of MySQL in his company, and he wasn't comfortable with it. He said: "I don't want my people playing around with that thing, because it will never get into production."

Another misnomer about open source is that it's free innovation. We have 1,200 engineers. And we're a lot smaller than Oracle. The reality is that the proprietary vendors are more innovative than the open-source guys.

IBM recently liberalized the usage restrictions on its free version of DB2. Would you do the same? I think we would. I can't right now identify what it would be. We'll adapt with the times on that, for sure.