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Oracle, Creator of PHP?

Posted by Pierre in PHP
Friday, February 10. 2006

There is rumours relayed by The Register about Oracle acquisitions plan, it is a quite surprising to see Zend in the list. Note that the text is not clear, but whether it is true or not, the scenario is interesting enough to think about the impacts in the PHP world.

Many people in the past were criticizing MySQL in PHP, was it not one of the main reasons of the PHP success? But the cooperation and MySQL strategy was based on a clear and relatively transparent process.

It is not acceptable to read “Zend, creator of PHP”, as it is a respect less affront to the large PHP developers community. It will be an insult to read “Oracle, creator of PHP” ... But I doubt it will ever happen, or at least not soon. But having Oracle as Zend’s owner will definitively not make anything better.

To read “Zend’s PHP software language is one of the most prevalent on the Web” (businessweek) is as annoying as “Zend, creator of PHP”, but the day I will read “Oracle, Creator of PHP” it could ring the toll of my love with PHP.

From Businessweek. and TheRegister

Comments (4)

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ME - #1 - 2006-02-10 16:25 - (Reply)

ok, lets move on to perl

Bertrand Mansion - #2 - 2006-02-10 14:23 - (Reply)

Quite frankly, I don’t see why this couldn’t/wouldn’t happen. Oracle already bought InnoBase, the makers of InnoDB, the most interesting DB format for MySQL in my eyes. The Register says Oracle hesitates between JBoss, Sleepycat and Zend. All three look indeed like interesting targets for Oracle and the one they will want to buy will really determine the direction Oracle is going to take in the future. If they buy Sleepycat, then it means they want to get even stronger in the database arena. But why ? They already have a dominent position and they just bought Innobase. In comparison, Sleepycat looks a bit "little" and doesn’t represent a big threat, nor an opportunity. Innobase acquisition was probably made to slow MySQL expansion as a major competitor and it made sense. Maybe Oracle is planning to release a lighter version, in which case, incorporatin lighter solutions would make sense. JBoss acquisition on the other hand would mean that Oracle still believes in the Java technology. Oracle embrassed Java a few years ago, and all of a sudden it became more difficult to install their software and to deploy them on Linux (think patches, memory extensions, bigger swap, etc). But at that time, it seemed like the way to go for a lot of companies. So the Java move made sense a few years ago. I am not sure today. I see a lot of Java web developers switching to Ruby on Rails. Applications being developed with software like WebSphere or Weblogic are most of the time unfinished and never reach the production step. I have worked for companies that spent billions in these technologies to finally rewrite everything in PHP just a few months before the launch date. So Oracle buying JBoss would mean it still believes in Java for the web and wants to capitalize on a technology they already invested a lot of resources in. Now, Oracle buying Zend sounds strange. But if Oracle doesn’t do it, then IBM will probably try. Those companies have to find a way to sell more of their products. And as the database market is saturated in the company area, the main opportunity today (well, for some years now) is the Internet and all that comes with it like web services. And in this domain, PHP dominates, along with MySQL. But it sounds strange because DB2, like Oracle, are already both well supported in PHP. What could they add to PHP to either make the other system less supported or to make theirs better supported ? I don’t see it right now and I don’t think that’s the goal. Zend is not PHP despite what they claim, it’s a company that has also a good Java knowledge (thanks to their IDE) and sells all-in-one solutions for big web infrastructure deployement. And this sounds a lot more interesting. Imagine an all-in-one package with all Zend stuff, tightly coupled with Oracle stuff. It could sell I think. So Oracle buying Zend makes sense. Still I would prefer IBM to buy it as they do more for open-source than Oracle (ICU, SDO for PHP5, etc.). IBM already seems to have a good knowledge of what is PHP, whereas Oracle never contributed anything that I know of. ... What would it mean for us, the vast majority of small (but clever ;-) ) developers ?

Bertrand Mansion - #3 - 2006-02-10 18:38 - (Reply)

Actually, I am learning Python at the moment :-) I wouldn’t recommend Perl though.

Mike Willbanks - #4 - 2006-02-11 21:39 - (Reply)

Oracle actually did contribute to PHP. Definitely in the later versions they helped produce a much better oracle extension. Which the previous extension had many many faults. But that was to help them not the PHP core :-)


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