Heres the best one, a letter sent out by Inprise in Holland, to its
InterBase customers in January 2000

----- Original Message -----
From: Marcel Timmers
To: Marcel Timmers
Sent: Monday, January 03, 2000 5:12 PM
Subject: InterBase future !!


Dear Customer,

Recently, there has been much speculation and questions raised about the

future of InterBase. Recognising that you need to effectively plan for
the future of your products and your business, we would like to take
this opportunity to inform you of Inprise's plan for InterBase.

The most important message we'd like to convey to you is that we
reaffirm our commitment to you, our InterBase customer. However, as a
result of a strategic review of our product lines as part of a plan to
focus on strategic market opportunities, we determined that InterBase is

not a core business for Inprise/Borland. As a result of this, we decided

to stop research and development for InterBase.

Our plan, in an effort to extend the life of your applications, support
your future development, and protect your investment, is to open-source
InterBase 6.0 which is currently in beta for Linux, as well as Windows
NT and Solaris, in the first half of 2000. By open sourcing InterBase,
we will be releasing to the community a world-class database that
companies world-wide will and have relied on to deliver
business-critical, mobile computing and Internet-based applications.
Our plan to open-source InterBase will not only allow you to continue to

develop and expand your applications but will also provide you and the
industry the InterBase source code.

Sales and support of current versions of InterBase will be maintained
through normal channels. As a result, our support efforts will be
focused on the current version alone. We will continue to support
current contracts in place.

We look forward to working closely together with you and the new
open-source community as we move forward. If you have any questions
concerning the InterBase strategy outlined here, please call us and we
will be happy to provide additional clarification.

Regards,

Inprise B.V.