Bjoern (PHP Magazine) pointed us via his blog to a story in the latest Computerwoche (a german IT magazine), about PHP, Zend and 20 developers.

I am again wordless, here some translated quotes (from Bjoern):

• Currently, the language PHP consists of Zend-Core which is developed exclusively by 20 Zend employees
• The full product, PHP, is distributed by Zend in two product lines, the development environment ‘Studio’ and the productive environment ‘Platform’
• “Zend Core” (which is a PHP distribution + fixes + support)
• Computerworld drew a chart with the title “The future of PHP” structured by the components “Zend Studio Pro”, “Zend Platform Pro” and “Complete PHP Toolkit” (they mentioned the creator/source of the chart – Zend).

I’m shocked, again. It is not the first time and it will certainly not be the last time they will be respectless for the large PHP developers community (talking about the developers of PHP here). Bjoern, given his position, is way too diplomatic in his post. Whether I like what Andi and Zeev did a couple of years ago in the engine, that does not give their company the rights to lie and misinform.

What will be PHP without Rasmus? What will be the engine without the permanent efforts of helly and Ilia? What will be php without XML support? Rob and Christian are the authors of all XML support in PHP, only soap was done by Dmitry (Zend employee). Databases support? mysql, pgsql, sqlite, all of them are not developed or maintained by Zend. Graphics support? Nothing from Zend either, etc. (I will not list all extensions and developers here

In other words, come back to Earth, PHP can live without Zend, can Zend live without PHP?

All these sad stories make me think about an old (crazy) idea: a PHP Foundation, IBMers and other Oracle will then have a partner of choice, the true PHP Creators

Andi, Zeev, do you really accept that your company says such things? And please do not tell me that is only a wording problem…

Update Andi and Zeev both answered here. Yes Andi, I know (you) better than that :), I was asking why you still did not act to prevent such things to happen. For what I read in the story, the Zend President-CEO is quoted, Mr. Gerstel, maybe it is time to revert your PR process? bottom-top instead of top-bottom?

Update #2 Give mysql and pgsql credits back to Zeev (that must be years