Microsoft Partners With Zend

jesse.castro writes to point out news of Microsoft striking a multi-year partnership with PHP provider Zend to improve PHP's performance on Windows-based Web servers. From the article: "Rather than marking a sudden change of course, Microsoft is openly engaging in a dialogue with Zend, a key open source promoter, and millions of PHP developers, analysts said."

Comments

It's a trap ?

[pembo13]

One would think MS has enough languages of their own. None of which I personally like.

Why are people freaking out?

[moore.dustin]

This is good news as far as I am concerned. Additional support from a major provider of server OS's to a widely used OPEN SOURCE language can and will help. It is not like PHP is only thing out there now and its flaws are more apparent now with the whole web 2.0 and its corresponding languages. Maybe some support and extra innovation will keep it viable and maintain its developers/users. I know I have been looking to other languages more and more as time goes by.

What does this mean for ASP though? Short answer is probably nothing I am guessing, but could this mean something down the road?

This makes me happy.

[KermodeBear]

As a PHP developer this could be a great boon for me. With Microsoft actively getting involved with PHP, perhaps more companies will consider using it. More jobs opportunities for me - whee! Maybe I can get out of Buffalo...

That said, this confuses me a bit:

Technical improvements by Zend and Microsoft to make it easier to run PHP on Windows[...]

Since when was it difficult to run PHP on Windows? I have written code that runs on both Linux and Windows machines, and, like most scripting languages, "it just works". There are a few extensions (like process control) that don't work under Windows - but the need for those extensions is very small. For a vast majority of scripting you don't need to do anything differently under Linux than you do Windows. I wish the article would have gone more in depth about these alleged problems.

This is the hug of the bear

[Anonymous Coward]

Beware. This may well be a tactic to stall the development of key open source projects. Note that Microsoft has done a similar deal with Xen (virtualization). By offering a small amount of money (for Microsoft), they gain control over the direction of the project.

Microsoft has invested in SCO. Do you think they changed their mind about open source one day to the other? No.

I wouldn't be surprised to see more of these deal with other open source firms (think Red Hat, Novell, ...).

The only way to protect open source is by GPL'ing it and keeping it out of the enterprise sphere. Community is harder buy.

Special MS PHP?

[pestilence669]

This isn't good news for any party. Is this the beginning of a "special" PHP version for Windows? It's not as far fetched as it sounds.

C++ in Visual Studio is not exactly standards compliant. It's definitely Microsoft specific, as is their: HTML, CSS, XML, Java, TCP/IP stack, HTTP negotiation, LDAP, kerberos, DNS, DHCP, etc., etc. Every "standard" and language they adopt gets altered, even when completely unnecessary.

What on earth will they do to PHP? Assimilate it into .NET?

What PHP really needs is a MS SQL driver that doesn't leak memory and cause access violations. Microsoft hasn't supported their C library in years. PHP doesn't need any "help" from Microsoft, IMHO.

Oh god

[Mancat]

Do you think that Microsoft would just like to improve IIS' PHP support? You know, so that they might attract more web developers to the IIS platform naturally?

God no. They must be trying to destroy it.

Slashdot logic.