Dear Pythia Users and Supporters,

We would like to communicate to you some important information
regarding the development of the Pythia event generator.

Over the years, we have enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the
major collider experiments. You have provided important feedback
on the comparison of data and predictions, noted errors in the
code, and made suggestions for improvements. We have responded to
requests, helped debug code when necessary, and been a partner
in the data analysis process. We look forward to continuing this
relationship in the future.

A key request of the LHC community has been for us to transition
from Fortran to C++. We have been manpower-limited, so that project
has taken much longer than it ought to have. However, since some
time now, the new Pythia 8 code should be able to do just about
everything the old Pythia 6 code could, and then some more.

We have retained a commitment to Pythia 6 because of its continued
use in Run 2 and the early stages of the LHC. However, we find it is
no longer tenable to split our resources between the development of
Pythia 8 and the support of Pythia 6.

Therefore we here present our timeline for transitioning to a
frozen version of Pythia 6, that will then remain a legacy code.

Development of Pythia 6 now stops. We will still provide support
and urgent fixes to the code, if necessary, until 1 March 2013.
At this point, the Pythia 6 code will be frozen, and a final legacy
version will be released later in 2013. We will then
continue to answer questions regarding the behavior of Pythia 6
until 1 July 2013, after which only Pythia 8 will be actively
developed and supported.

We believe this decision will allow us to have the most positive
impact on the field. We look forward to continuing our current
relationship based on Pythia 8.

Sincerely,
The Pythia6 Collaboration
(Torbjörn Sjöstrand, Stephen Mrenna, Peter Skands)