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PHP developed exclusively by 20 Zend employees

Posted by Pierre in PHP
Saturday, March 4. 2006

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 :-)

Comments (13)

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Andi Gutmans - #1 - 2006-03-04 05:12 - (Reply)

Pierre, come on you know better than that! I have no clue where this came from but this is definitely not something which came from Zeev or myself, and for sure not from our corporate marketing. I’ll look into it but you obviously don’t have to tell me about all the people who are contributing on a daily basis to PHP. It’s not something that I don’t acknowledge every single time I talk at conferences, to press and to analysts. What makes PHP great is the community. That’s what open-source is about.

Björn Schotte - #2 - 2006-03-04 08:05 - (Reply)

Andi, the chart in this article was created by Zend (subtitle of the chart: "Source: Zend"). I don’t believe that it’s the only fault of the author of the article.

Pierre - #3 - 2006-03-05 20:32 - (Reply)

The past shown that Zend does such declarations (remember the "Creator of PHP), secondly these are mostly quotes, not interpreted texts. The fact remains. My definition of journalism does not match wiht many BS writers, irrc.

shlomil - #4 - 2006-03-07 11:51 - (Reply)

> secondly these are mostly quotes, not interpreted texts. .. right , these are quotes from the words of the author of the article as Björn mentioned. So you can’t really rule out misinterpreted text.

Pierre - #5 - 2006-03-08 03:15 - (Reply)

You misunderstood, the quotes I consider as bad are quotes from the CEO...

thies - #6 - 2006-03-09 15:51 - (Reply)

shlomil, calling things unusable (the oci stuff) that are today and have been in the past used on largish productions sites is just plain stupid. you have to understand that i create stuff for me and my needs. i’m happy that someone who is paid for coding php and not for coding in php has taken over – but it sickens me that someone like you calls my work basically worthless. i have seen similar comments (from "your contributions count less then mine" to "your contributions are worthless") about my and also others peoples work made by some prominent member of the "php-community". i think what we are seeing here (and this brings us pack to the point pierre is making) is a lack of respect shown by certain peoples and maybe a certain company towards the php-community. that sucks! plus it will eventually destroy the warm fuzzy feeling that contributors need to find motivation to contribute their most valuable thing (= their free time) to php. so what zend (‘s PR) is doing (and you seem to be supporting just that) is damaging (atleast the spirit of) the community for their own interest. pfui! goodby and thanks for the fish!

Sara Golemon - #7 - 2006-03-09 20:34 - (Reply)

The statement might be bogus and a gross misinterpretation of information, but let’s turn over the program guide from the Zend conferrence in Burlingame last fall. What’s this written across the top in bold lettering? PHP == Zend It’s true, the keynotes given by Zend personnel all extolled the contributions of the community and PHP’s status as a group effort. But someone, somewhere in the organization didn’t seem to get the memo because this is not the only example of statements attributed to Zend saying "We are PHP".

Zeev Suraski - #8 - 2006-03-04 11:12 - (Reply)

The statement in the paper is totally bogus, and I can assure you it didn’t come from Andi, me, or Mark (our CMO). Frankly, I have absolutely no idea where it came from. Our contributions to the PHP project are big enough so that we don’t have to use imaginary marketing anyway. Much like I’m positive Rasmus never told any paper that PHP is a product of Lerdorf Consultants, Inc. – and yet it was published numerous times (and even won some prizes) under this name, you can rest assured that nobody from Zend told the paper that PHP is Zend’s product, or anything else other than the fact that PHP is a community project. The charts are floating around and are definitely not secret.

Pierre - #9 - 2006-03-04 13:14 - (Reply)

I’m sure that neither You or Zeev said that, however the fact is that you have a problem in Zend. As I said, it is not the first time something like that happens (and not only in Germnay), do you remember "The Creator of PHP", for example? I do think there is a communication problem in your company, or the view on the Zend role differs from one department to another, does that excuse anything? I do not think so.

Zeev Suraski - #10 - 2006-03-05 01:16 - (Reply)

Oh yeah, one fix – I did develop the MySQL & PostgreSQL extensions :-) I no longer maintain them though.

shlomil - #11 - 2006-03-05 15:50 - (Reply)

Yet another fix – Databases support – Antony (which is a Zend employee) maintains the the OCi8 Extension which was very buggy and prctically unusable before he did so.

Pierre - #12 - 2006-03-05 18:21 - (Reply)

It was usable, only not with all versions or features. Tony is a bug killer, he fixes bugs everywhere in PHP :-) If we have 20 Tony, and all by zend, then I will love zend declarations, it is not the case. But the point is about who made what PHP is, I have to give credits to the whole community and not to 20 Zend developers.

shlomil - #13 - 2006-03-05 19:54 - (Reply)

I don’t think that reffering to something written by the press as "Zend Declarations" is the right thing to do here. The last time that I was interviewed by a journalist (unrelated to Zend) I got so mad when I saw the outcomming article and then I realized that it happens all the time. Journalists are always twisting the facts for two major reasons : They don’t understand the subject they write about, and the #1 reason – They want to make their article a little more interesting. Sometimes it’s not the reporter but the editor who make these changes. So, if you think that Journalism has anything to do with the real world then you have a lot to learn:)


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