Monty and all at MySQL,

I am sorry to hear about this most unfortunate situation. It is sad to see that NuSphere have taken it upon themselves to attempt to steal your intellectual property and try to benefit from all of the MySQL team's hard work. My company has been licensing using MySQL for development of our products for the past 18 months or so and I have had nothing but good things to say about MySQL. You are a credit to the open source community and I believe you have found the perfect balance with MySQL for both open source and commercial users.

Your comments that you totally rely on the trust of your users is admirable and very much appreciated by many people I am sure. However, being the human race, there are always people that are going to take liberties and abuse such trust. I hope that your legal defence is swift and successful and does not cause too much disruption to your day to day business.

As far as I am concerned, if NuSphere are selling a product derived from MySQL, then they should be paying MySQL.com a license fee to ensure that the professionals that are responsible for the creation of MySQL can continue to develop MySQL.

We *embed* MySQL into our products and pay commercial license fees for the use of MySQL. Having dealt with MySQL at a commercial level, I can honestly say that, there is absolutely no excuse for what NuSphere have done. Your licensing policies have been totally fair, non-restrictive and realistic.

Needless to say, You have our full support and rest assured I, or anyone who works at my company will not have anything to do with either mysql.org or NuSphere now or in the future.

Kind Regards