Letter from Mårten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB

Dear MySQL User,

As you may have seen in the news, MySQL AB has agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems. We believe that this is good news for our customers, partners, users, employees and shareholders.

In light of this announcement, I want to personally extend to you our team's commitment to deliver on ideals you have witnessed from MySQL from our inception: software freedom, online innovation, community and partner participation, and providing outstanding value to our customers. I hope you have noticed over the years our passion to provide highly useful and timely customer service with a personal touch. This commitment of ours will continue through the integration period with Sun and thereafter.

And more generally, what does this acquisition mean for you?

• Our strategy and roadmap will continue as before, only with an acceleration in market reach and innovation.
• MySQL and Sun will continue to honor all agreements made with customers and partners.
• Specifically, we will continue to support the popular platforms and languages we support today.
• Sun is today the world's largest vendor of free and open source software. Our commitment to the FOSS communities and an architecture of participation will continue and increase.
• The integration of the MySQL database with Sun’s global services capabilities and highly complementary product line-up will deliver even more powerful solutions for the online world, global enterprises, Telecommunications industry and the ever-growing MySQL ISV and OEM partner community.
• MySQL customers will benefit from additional integration with Sun hardware and software -- if they so choose.

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is anticipated to close later in Q1 or early Q2 this year. Current information about the pending acquisition can be found at http://mysql.com/sun .

For an independent view of the acquisition, I recommend reading this recently-published Gartner Group analyst report:
http://www.gartner.com/resources/154800/154828/mysql_acquisition_edges_sun__154828.pdf

Thank you for your support of MySQL solutions, community and our company. We look forward to continuing to provide you with the world’s most popular open source database, as well as world-class support. We also welcome your comments and questions about the transaction and the future of MySQL. Please contact your MySQL sales representative, or feel free to email me at marten@mysql.com

Sincerely,

Mårten Mickos
CEO, MySQL AB

P.S. We invite you to witness the dawn of this exciting new era at the MySQL Conference & Expo this April 14-17 in Santa Clara, California. There will be dozens of technical presentations, as well as detailed product roadmaps and corporate announcements. We hope to see you there: www.mysqlconf.com.