Lead PHP Developer Quits

Jasper Bryant-Greene writes "Jani Taskinen, one of the lead developers of the Zend Engine (the engine that powers PHP), as well as a lead developer for the thread safety system and other core components of the PHP project, has quit in a relatively cryptic message to the php-internals mailing list. Jani has been involved with PHP for about 6 years and his loss will undoubtedly be a big blow for the PHP project."

Message text

[Anonymous Coward]

The server is rapidly getting slower, so:

From: Jani Taskinen
Date: Thu Jul 27 20:28:45 2006
Subject: Good bye.
Groups: php.internals

Thank you all for the last 6 years or so. It has been fun (sometimes)
and many times not so much fun. Unfortunately I have had enough and
I don't want to be associated with this project anymore.
 
I'm sure most people (the ones who matter) can understand why.
If someone doesn't, I could not care less. Take care.
 
Please do not reply to this email.
 
--Jani
 
p.s. Delete my CVS account. I have no use for it anymore.

Pity

[LarsWestergren]

Harsh words, sounds like there is some personal conflict involved. Or maybe he just got tired and wanted to move on to something different. Best wishes to all involved anyways.

Unfortunate for the Zend team, but I'm sure it won't be the death of PHP. There are many other developers, and you can still run PHP sites with other engines, for instance, the Quercus [caucho.com] engine in Cauchos Resin I'm sure there are similar modules available in the mono/.Net world and others.

Jani Taskinen who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jani "sniper" Taskinen
Jani worked on the PHP core and the Zend Engine.

Jani has contributed to php.net in the following ways over the last 12 months:
        * as a lead developer for Zend Engine II
        * as a lead developer for TSRM (Thread Safety Resource Management)
        * by testing and maintaining the build for the PHP core
        * by writing/maintaining tests for the standard functions in the PHP core
        * as a lead developer for gd, a core extension
        * by working as a developer on imap, a core extension
        * by working as a developer on session, a core extension
        * by working as a developer on sockets, a core extension
        * by providing occasional fixes for the testsuite distributed with PHP
        * by applying maintenance fixes to the underlying libraries in bcmath, pcre and xmlrpc
        * by providing tests and occasional fixes for xml
        * by providing occasional fixes for apache2filter, apache2handler, apache_hooks, cgi, cli, dba, dom, iconv, informix, isapi, ldap, mcrypt, mcve, mime_magic, msql, mssql, mysqli, mysql, ncurses, oci8, odbc, openssl, oracle, pgsql, recode, snmp, soap, sqlite, sybase, tidy and tokenizer
        * by writing/maintaining tests for mbstring, mhash, pcntl, pspell, shmop and wddx
        * by working as a developer on bugs.php.net

Re:Message text

[QAPete]

Rage quit FTL!

Seriously, though, a more thorough listing of Jani's contributions over the past 6+ years might better show just how much of a loss it is to have him depart the scene (from http://www.zend.com/person.php?handle=sniper [zend.com]:

• as a lead developer for Zend Engine II
• as a lead developer for TSRM (Thread Safety Resource Management)
• by testing and maintaining the build for the PHP core
• by writing/maintaining tests for the standard functions in the PHP core
• as a lead developer for gd, a core extension
• by working as a developer on imap, a core extension
• by working as a developer on session, a core extension
• by working as a developer on sockets, a core extension
• by providing occasional fixes for the testsuite distributed with PHP
• by applying maintenance fixes to the underlying libraries in bcmath, pcre and xmlrpc
• by providing tests and occasional fixes for xml
• by providing occasional fixes for apache2filter, apache2handler, apache_hooks, cgi, cli, dba, dom, iconv, informix, isapi, ldap, mcrypt, mcve, mime_magic, msql, mssql, mysqli, mysql, ncurses, oci8, odbc, openssl, oracle, pgsql, recode, snmp, soap, sqlite, sybase, tidy and tokenizer
• by writing/maintaining tests for mbstring, mhash, pcntl, pspell, shmop and wddx
• by working as a developer on bugs.php.net

Whatever the reasons were, major thanks have to go to Jani for all of his work. We would be looking at a different www without his efforts.

Re:Good riddance... although a sad one!

[jkrise]

where's your wildly succesful open source project?

Huh... I made Linux-jkrise.. I once recompiled the kernel to fix some USB CDMA modem issue - does that count?

If they deliver the code and can keep the project together with their style, then can act how they want.

Actually, just a coupla' days back, I remember reading this stuff about a PHP book.
"This book, written by my colleague, Andi Gutmans, and two very prominent PHP developers, Stig Bakken and Derick Rethans, holds the key to unlocking the riches of PHP 5. It thoroughly covers all of the features of this new version, and is a must have for all PHP developers interested in exploring PHP 5's advanced features"

Zeev Suraski, Co-Designer of PHP 5 and Co-Creator of the Zend Engine

Looks like there's more than one creator of the Zend Engine... not just Jani. And that's the reason why I think inflated egos are bad in Open Source development teams.

From IRC, the reason:

[mkavanagh2]

"_sniper_" is Jani Taskinen.

<_sniper_> hehehehe..
<_sniper_> all other members of the UN security council wanted to condemn Israel for attacking the UN post but USA (freedom and democracy) vetoed it....Israel says the resolution was fair.
<_sniper_> hell yeah..
<_sniper_> NUKE ISRAEL!
<_sniper_> I'm so full of that fucking country..
<Shai-Tan> indeed
<_sniper_> Eye for an eye..I'll kill one Israel officer for one of ours, is that fair?
<_sniper_> I bet I'll be hanged for that.
<_sniper_> They kill one of my brother-in-arms-for-peace..I think I'm entitled to kill one of their nazis.
<_sniper_> Hezbollah, where can I enlist?
<_sniper_> FYI: I don't care at all what anybody thinks about me. I'm going to be openly anti-Israel from now on. This was the last straw for me. Fuck you jews.
<_sniper_> I will also quit this project. As long as it's backed by some Israel company, I don't want to have anything to do with it.
<_sniper_> Good bye.
<-- _sniper_ (~[e-mail]) has left #php.pecl

Seriously. Not kidding.

Re:From IRC, the reason:

[mkavanagh2]

As per anon-sibling, Zend is based in Israel and IIRC the two founders of Zend are also Israelis. They're probably not best buddies with Jani now, but I'm not sure anybody was ever best buddies with Jani.

Re:From IRC, the reason:

[ovatto]

It probably has something to do with this: http://virtual.finland.fi/stt/showarticle.asp?intN WSAID=13246&group=General [finland.fi]

Re:From IRC, the reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

...so those katyushas just magically appeared in the sky?

Sorry, Hezbollah is the de facto government in that part of Lebanon, and Hezbollah most assuredly does take orders (and thousands of missiles, and uniformed military 'observers') from Iran.

Israel occupied that part of Lebanon for over 20 years, and unilaterally withdrew. After the withdrawal, Hezbollah took over again and resumed lobbing missiles over the border. I had high hopes for democracy and a civil society in Lebanon after last year's events, but if the Lebanese can't control their own territory, or provide basic government services to Hezbollah-controlled areas, someone else needs to. Besides stateless terrorists bent on genocide, I mean.

Re:From IRC, the reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Jani has served as an UN peacekeeper. So probably, very much.

Re:From IRC, the reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Quote from the letter one of the guys who were shot :

"What I can tell you is this: we have on a daily basis had numerous occasions where our position has come under direct or indirect fire from both artillery and aerial bombing. The closest artillery has landed within 2 meters of our position and the closest 1000 lb aerial bomb has landed 100 meters from our patrol base. This has not been deliberate targeting, but has rather been due to tactical necessity."

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNew s/20060718/mideast_lebanon_UN_060716/20060718/ [www.ctv.ca]

Re:From IRC, the reason:

[aaronwormus]

Jani just returned from a 6 month peace-keeping tour in Afgahnistan, one of his co-workers was killed in what was called a deliberate attack on a UN position.

Regardless of stupid things that he said, I think it's VERY poor taste to post an emotional outburst (which was timestamped at 2am - yes, it's real) and to make such a big deal over this.

Move on people...

Re:From IRC, the reason:

[Nestafo]

I have no specific information about this incident, but if the IRC log is not a fake, this might be related:

http://wfrv.com/topstories/topstories_story_206180 457.html [wfrv.com]

One of the four UN peacekeepers killed by Israel was a 29-year old Finn.

Re:From IRC, the reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Hezbollah by it's actions of kidnapping Israeli soldiers provoked a response from Israel. There is no war with Lebanon, but unfortunately the cowardly Hezbollah militants like to hide their missles in civilian areas, forcing Israel to attack. Isreal has now put itself into a position where it has to defend itself by bombing civilian areas, a move that delights Hezbollah in that it makes Isreal look bad and garners support to the Hezbollah cause.

I believe the response from Israel to the kidnappings was idiotic, but this is coming from a westerner. The middle east is totally different and looking at the situ over there through a filter of western values I cannot properly asses it, only give my opinion.

I don't want to hear any crap about Israel taking away land from the palestinians. Much of it has been returned. This is how the game is played, people gain land and they lose it. It's been that way since the dawn of time, but there are people that will play the loss of land from the palestinians as a political poker chip to gain sympathy.

Re:Good riddance... although a sad one!

[smash]

Might I just say that without a leader who is a bit of a "bastard" on a decent sized open-source project, all the hard decisions will end up being made by committee... long after code could otherwise have been written and tested and perhaps changed direction.

Sometimes Linus is wrong (yes, it's true) sometimes he is right. Regardless though, he makes decisions and gets shit done. If those decisions turn out to be wrong, they can be corrected later if need be.

Classic example is the Bitkeeper debacle. Linus went with bitkeeper, because it was suitable at the time. People bitched and moaned about how he could be held to ransom by the company making it. In the end, the shit *did* hit the fan, and so Linus put out Git in a matter of weeks.

If he hadn't just made the decision and instead asked what every other kernel developer thought he should do, we'd still be waiting for a choice to be made...

Re:From IRC, the reason:

[Badly Configured]

Without making any comment on the previous post, it might be worth mentioning that Jani himself has served as a UN peace keeper in Southern Lebanon and has been at the receiving end of both Israel and Hezbollah fire. This may entitle him to have strong personal feelings about the recent death of a Finnish peace keeper at the same location, along ones from other countries.

Re:Shock!

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. "I could care less" is almost always used in the sense of "I could not care less". Perhaps it could be used sarcastically but you're probably the only person who would do so intentionally. C'mon. People are careless.

more logs because the internet likes pasted logs

[mkavanagh2]

Names changed because I like search/replace.

<apples> i don't think you should have posted it at all
<apples> and you could atleast have posted the whole thing
<pears> bananas jani is a good friend of ours
< bananas> I didn't have the whole thing
<pears> bananas: posting something out of contest is bad, and its not going to do him any good
<apples> the whole stuff on slashdot is actually crap
<apples> but that is nothing new
* pears is debating with himself whether to post to slasdot
<hedge> don't
<trees> well I kind of feel sorry for this now, I didn't expect pasting a few lines to a friend to turn into something
ike this :S
<pears> i have this feeling that it is unfair to jano
<pears> jani
<trees> however I wonder why he said that?
<pears> not to mentioned his life long peac keeping contributions
<hedge> it is, but IMO it's too late to change anything
<pears> serving among other places kosovo and lebanon
<pears> and being there himself (at the post where the 4 un peackeepers were killed by isreal)
<pears> and currently serving in afganistan
<pears> all that, and thanks to the IQ of our "friends" bananas and trees here
<pears> he comes as some nazi anti-semit biggot
<apples> trees: don't you say stupid things when you're drunk?

Re:From IRC, the reason:

[Kiaser Wilhelm II]

The term "anti-semitic" is one of the most abused phrases I have heard. The claim that not liking Jews means you dislike all Semitic people is not only grossly inaccurate, is also pejorative towards other Semitic people such as Arabs and Italians who are not a Jewish people.

The correct phrase would be "anti-Jewish" or "anti-Israeli".

Re:What are his reasons?

[morrisonsean]

Seriously, why the sour grapes?

He's pissed because one of the UN peacekeepers killed by the Israeli airstrike this week was Finnish. He's Finnish, and was supposedly a UN peacekeeper at one point. The projects he was working on were hosted by an Israeli company.

So he had an anti-semetic rant and quit.

digg link [digg.com] (which has a lot more insightful commentary, btw)

Re:No one seems to care

[ClayDowling]

More like nobody wants to acknowledge the gigantic elephant in the middle of that particular room. If the IRC logs are to be believed this is directly related to international politics. PHP and Zend are directly tied to Israel. Jan had very real, very personal reasons for not wanting to be associated with Israelis, so he bolted. Personally I can't blame him. There's a lot of hatred towards Israel right now, and they've gone out of their way to earn it. Most likely, nobody else on the project really wants to step into that mess. The internal developers' mailing list really isn't the place for international politics, and no good will come of discussing it there.

There may be more defections in the future for similar reasons. If that becomes a real problem then it might be a good idea to move the project's home and affiliations to a more neutral country like Canada or Germany, although at the moment I don't think that Canada is full of warm and fuzzy feelings for Israel either.

Re:Hmmmmm

[jdowland]

The problem is PHP *is* thread-safe. The issue is the things PHP links against (I've heard gettext is at least one culprit).

Re:From IRC, the reason:

[fitsy]

He refers to one (Finnish) of the four UN peacekeepers which were bombed (some say deliberately) by the Israelis a couple of days ago. Search your favourite news site for the full details.

Re:Message text

[jZnat]

I don't even know what could have caused him to quit now. Could it be the Date class flamewars? That's the only thing that seems to have been unruly lately in the internals mailing list.

Re:Looks like a stomp and a doorslam.

[pen]

Emotional Trap: The belief that you can make important decisions when you're feeling strong emotions.

Re:Shock!

[Anonymous Coward]

I appreciate what you're trying to do here, but you fucked it up:

A statement cannot infer a meaning. A statement can imply a meaning. A person infers a meaning, possibly because a statement implies it.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled pedantry.

Re:ancient chinese wisdom

[01101101]

if i'm angry when i push the send button, i always regret it. go for a walk, split some firewood, or just sit still, but don't send that email. (save it as a draft if necessary, calm down, then delete without sending)

That's good advice. I will also add, don't fill in the to: field until you are ready to send it. I've taken to that practice when I am writing an e-mail that has to be delicately worded. It's not that hard to get distracted and hit 'send' without thinking when your attention returns. At least if the to: is blank, you get a second chance.

Re:Israel is not "attacking the civilian populatio

[ray-auch]

Israel is attacking military targets that Hezbollah has purposly intermingled amongst civilians

like civilian airports ? power stations ? sewage works ?

pretty big targets to be hit "accidentally".

In fact, Israel has taken pains to inform civilians

And then killed them when they flee their homes in response to those warnings.
And then attacked red cross ambulances evacuating the wounded.
And attacked the UN convoys taking aid to those too frightened to move.
And the unarmed UN observers (in a bunker, apparently detroyed by precision guided weapon, after repeated requests from the UN not to hit those coordinates).
And then shelled the UN rescue effort for the observers.

Sure, Hezbolla is throwing back random unguided rockets, but the IDF does not have that excuse, they are supposedly using modern precision guided weapons, it's pretty hard to believe all these are all accidentally off-target.

Finally, today's news quote:

The Israeli military's radio station in south Lebanon today warned that the army "will totally destroy any village from which missiles are fired toward Israel".

So, in their own words, this is defintely purposeful.

Fact is neither side cares about civilian lives.

I hope that isn't true

[Anonymous Coward]

Violent racism is such an ugly thing.

As to murdering Jews in retaliation for a dead UN officer: Finland sent shiploads of Jews to Auschwitz during WWII. And we (I'm a Finn) didn't do that by accident, we knew well what we were doing. So if Mr. Taskinen is keeping score, we are still the bad guys by a huge margin.

Just so that we all know who should be nuked.

Re:Message text

[Andrey]

Jani has undoubtedly contributed a lot to the PHP project, but he is _not_ a lead developer on Zend Engine or TSRM. The original Slashdot post makes it sound like this is some sort of death blow for PHP. It is not. As a simple example, Jani has been gone on a UN peace forces duty in Afghanistan for the past 6 months and while his presence was missed (mostly in bugs triage and build system), the project has not lost any steam or anything like that. Consider this:

% grep sniper TSRM/*.[ch]
TSRM/tsrm_nw.c:/* $Id: tsrm_nw.c,v 1.8.2.1 2006/01/01 12:50:00 sniper Exp $ */
TSRM/tsrm_virtual_cwd.h:/* $Id: tsrm_virtual_cwd.h,v 1.48.2.5 2006/04/10 11:56:18 sniper Exp $ */
TSRM/tsrm_win32.c:/* $Id: tsrm_win32.c,v 1.27.2.1 2006/01/01 12:50:00 sniper Exp $ */
TSRM/tsrm_win32.h:/* $Id: tsrm_win32.h,v 1.19.2.1 2006/01/01 12:50:00 sniper Exp $ */
% grep Jani Zend/*.[ch]
% grep sniper Zend/*.[ch]

I am not sure how his profile on zend.com was compiled, but whoever did it should have been more accurate. Let me emphasize this: Jani is a friend and will be missed, but that was his personal decision made for personal reasons (which I will not disclose here) and will not affect the project.

Let's all keep our heads up and speculation down.

-Andrei
http://www.gravitonic.com/ [gravitonic.com]

Re:From IRC, the reason:

[amabbi]

Care to provide any proof for your baseless assertion? Exactly what do you call dropping a 500-pound bomb on a house with a family sleeping inside? An "oopsie"?

Why sure. Israel has been dropping pamphlets into neighborhoods before they drop bombs, warning civilians to leave the area because an air raid is about to commence.

This is precisely the kind of apologism that emboldens the Israeli government to carry out it's genocidal policies, and it's no accident either that so many people are brainwashed to think this way. The Israel/US axis has an intellectual stranglehold on the press in the US. You can read a lot more reality coming from the Israeli press. Israel absolutely targets civilian targets, much like the US military has done in Fallujah and elsewhere.

Wonderful. Can you cite which page in Protocols of the Elders of Zion you read that from?

Re:Israel is not "attacking the civilian populatio

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider this a rant but might be worth seeing anyways.
http://209.67.212.138/~lebanon/ [209.67.212.138]
as many readers of this forum are american, you just might give some thinking about what kind of support your republican gov is giving to what kind of animals?

Re:From IRC, the reason:

[sonictheboom]

the first page on google is your friend (or maybe foe)
Israelis accused of 'human shields' tactic : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/52128 70.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Israel's supreme court says the use of Palestinian human shields in arrest raids violates international law : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/43148 98.stm [bbc.co.uk]
A five-year-old boy is shot dead in Gaza as Israeli human rights activists condemn troops for the alleged use of "human shields : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/21951 55.stm [bbc.co.uk]
.. the young man, who was said to have had no political affiliations, was used as a "human shield" by the Israelis: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/21937 59.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Use of Palestinian Civilians as Human Shields by the Israeli Army: http://www.adalah.org/eng/humanshields.php [adalah.org]
Israeli soldiers who took over the buildings used the occupants as human shield: http://www.btselem.org/english/Human_Shields/20060 720_Human_Shields_in_Beit_Hanun.asp [btselem.org]
The Human Shields of Nazareth : http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=933 3 [antiwar.com]
The Israeli army has signalled its intention to keep using Palestinian civilians as human shields in operations : http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8431605A-2F 44-4282-8037-E8B53A529EB9.htm [aljazeera.net]