“It felt very clear to us that it needed to be open source, what we were doing,” Merriman continued. “We also like open source, so that was a factor too, almost a non business reason. A business reason, though, is part of the idea of strategy. We really wanted to be ubiquitous; we wanted to be everywhere. If people are using this database they need to know it and they need to understand it. There needs to be a community. There needs to be a critical mass of knowledgeable people, workers, who can code to it, who can administer it, who can operate it. It’ll be much easier to do that if it’s open source because it’ll be much wider used.”