An Open Letter to the Community from MySQL Founders David Axmark & Michael "Monty" Widenius

To our fellow developers & users of Free & Open Source Software:

This year, we are celebrating ten years of MySQL: the database, the company and the community. It's been hard (and interesting!) work for us -- but looking back, we should celebrate how far we've come. We created the best software we could for you, and you turned it into the most popular database of its kind. We want to thank you for this.

As a FOSS (Free & Open Source Software) company since the very beginning, MySQL has received an enormous amount of support from developers and users over the years in a thousand different forms, including feature ideas, bug reports and fixes, beta-testing, utilities and add-ons -- as well as lots & lots of evangelism. In fact, many of our employees were recruited out of the community!

Most recently, the initiative to allow software patents in Europe was soundly defeated in the EU Parliament. We are proud that MySQL's investment contributed to a small group of hard-working activists (thanks FFII) building a grassroots political movement that was able to stop a very powerful (and very rich) lobby of software monopolies. We believe this is the biggest story of 2005 -- and a great victory for software innovation!

Some other awe-inspiring MySQL stats that show the momentum of MySQL:

• To date, we estimate that over 100 million copies of MySQL have been distributed through our Web site & operating system distributions. And we get approximately 40,000 new downloads every day.
• There are lots and lots of books on MySQL in for example English (Amazon gives 196 in English), German (118), French (146), Japanese (46), Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Norwegian, Malay and even Swedish (our native language).
• A thousand partners in our ecosystem, providing great opportunities for open source and free software experts to earn money off what they do.
• More than 1,500 projects on Sourceforge that leverage MySQL.
• Major free software projects and hugely-popular Web sites such as the Sahana (disaster recovery system for the tsunami), Ensembl.org and Human Genome Project (used for cancer research), Wikipedia, Bugzilla, Craigslist, Feedster, Flickr, Freshmeat, LiveJournal, Neopets, Slashdot, SugarCRM, Technorati, Wordpress, CERN's ATLAS Experiment -- all taking advantage of MySQL's speed, ease of use, flexibility, scalability and ecosystem.

As great as the past decade has been however, we have even more in store for the near future -- including MySQL 5.0, which we hope you will prove to be the best MySQL ever. Get the latest beta at dev.mysql.com and start trying out its new features, including stored procedures, triggers and views. While 5.0 still has some bugs (lots of new code) nearly all the serious bugs have been fixed in the past few months with every MySQL developer focused on bug fixing. But we might of course have missed some of your bugs *because we did not know about them*. So please report your bugs to us (at bugs.mysql.com). You know, we hate bugs.

Our Community Relations manager, Arjen is recognizing a few of our community members who have provided extra effort and resources to encourage MySQL's ecosystem. Please see the new "MySQL Guilds" page at (http://dev.mysql.com/guilds/) for additional info on these wonderful volunteers.

Also, check out & contribute to the new Planet MySQL blog site. It's a great place to follow MySQL trends and learn more about database development from some very knowledgeable people. (Even though the two of us haven't got around to start blogging yet, it might actually happen any year now!).

As always, we want to hear your ideas on how MySQL can be a better partner with the open source community. Both of us will be at the OSCON show in Portland this week and David will also be at parts of LinuxWorld in San Francisco next week. If you see us walking around, please stop us to say hello (don't be shy, we seldom bite!)

Good luck & best wishes, Monty & David

OSCON -- August 2, 2005