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."

Re:PHP on Windows

[Mad Merlin]

As for MySQL - it's now owned by Oracle and IMHO Larry Ellison has a far better shot at being the antichrist than Bill Gates. Yes we have all that GPLd code but the company, talent and non-GPL rights to the code are owned by Oracle.

Um... no. Oracle bought InnoDB and BDB (both separate projects from MySQL), two of the many backend formats that MySQL can use. It still has MyISAM and a few others, not to mention that Oracle hasn't bought MySQL itself or anything it owns.

Re:It's a trap ?

[gmack]

You mean like Zend studio? [zend.com]

Re:It's a trap ?

[Shawn is an Asshole]

There is an excellent IDE for PHP. It's called PHP Eclipse [phpeclipse.de], which is a plug in for Eclipse [eclipse.org].

Re:It's a trap ?

[Achromatic1978]

A few people have mentioned Zend Studio, but I find it sluggish. My vote goes to ActiveState's Komodo.

Re:Hooray for Microsoft Zend 2007, Ultimate Editio

[LVWolfman]

Here's another more fitting example... Remember the Sybase partnership? Wasn't too many years before MS released MS SQL which "just happens" to be totally Sybase compatible and then didn't need Sybase. How about Foxpro?

I remember reading some interviews with companies whose technology had been "innovated" by Microsoft. One guy said (paraphrased), "It's a catch-22. If you partner with them, they get cheap access to your technology and take it from you. If you don't partner with them, they'll go to your competition and that might be the one time that the partnership works for the competition."

Seriously. Every time Microsoft partners with someone it means they're doomed. Remember when Microsoft "partnered" with any of these guys?

* Netscape
* Palm
* Symantec and McAfee
* Sendo

A good thing

[talonyx]

PHP is licensed under the GPL, so we don't need to worry about an MS-proprietary version of it. They'd have to reimplement the system from scratch, and who would bother to do that when they have ASP.NET?

I for one would love to see .NET support for PHP so I could use it to write native Windows GUI programs, access ODBC in a more robust fashion, and get more access to Windows-internal stuff that is so easy to do on Unix but so hard to do on Windows.
A bit of performance would be nice, but chances are I will keep running my servers on Debian simply because that's all they are: brainless webservers with muscle and nothing holding them back.

PHP is not GPLed

[VolkerLanz]

PHP is licensed under the GPL, so we don't need to worry about an MS-proprietary version of it.

PHP is not licensed under the GPL. It comes with its own license, called "The PHP License" (3.0 in the sources I have here). Looks like a BSD-like license to me at a quick glance.

I vaguely remember PHP not being GPLed the reason that MySQL made an exception in their licensing of the database to allow PHP to work and talk with it (MySQL consider communication over TCP/IP as derivative work, IIRC).