For the first time the support business is a free market. There's competition for who's going to win business for supporting software. If we're all successful there's a lot of money out there for everyone.

You have lots of people from around the world contributing new features to it, testing it, fixing bugs in it -- it's really a community of developers interested in the software and making the software better.

We found this was really what they were thinking about. They don't see those [proprietary application server] products as being commodities yet. They're augmenting their investments with open source technology to fill gaps.

Although they thought the functional quality [of open source components] to be very high, they thought that nobody was really testing the software to the level they use it.

The cost of software is going down rapidly, the cost of producing intellectual property is going down dramatically, and the ability to differentiate is also going down. But if the costs of producing software and distributing software have gone down so dramatically, why does it still cost so much to buy software?

They're big and they push the ball up the court. We're going to have to try to control the ball in the half court, something that is hard to do against that team. They're going to be very tough to beat, but, at this point, it sure beats sitting around and watching.