Just spotted an interesting article speculating on how the new changes in PHP5 can be a sign that it might be owned by Sun in the near future.
Well, the new changes in PHP5 are tremendous, and they do bring PHP5 much closer to Java in terms of OO design, except PHP5 isn’t Java, and probably it’ll never be!
What makes PHP compelling to new comers isn’t how it handles OO, it isn’t PEAR, and it certainly isn’t that it can be mixed with HTML code, barely anyone uses that; it’s that it’s easy to pick up compared to other languages, like Perl for instance. If PHP loses this, it won’t be as appealing as it is now, so it’s not in anyone’s benefit for PHP to become, God forbid, Java; we already have one.
PHP is an open-source project, probably not in a way that FSF would define it, but still, you can have the source code, play with it, even compile it and sell it, it’s nobody’s business. This is to PHP’s advantage, and a lot of develops feel somehow secure knowing that even if a company like Sun acquires Zend, they can still fork the whole project and go in separate ways. That doesn’t mean that if Sun does acquire Zend is a necessarily bad thing, it might for PHP’s own good. But the fact that Sun is considered a not-so-open-source by many pro-open source develops, can be disturbing.
I personally agree more with Rasmus’s view on where should PHP go from here, namely to Parrot. It runs better, it’s interoperability with other languages running on Parrot reduces code rewrite, and can easily compete in Java’s market, and probably .NET’s too. I don’t think there’s any there’s any real reason for developers to worry about PHP’s future, we’ll still be able to write scripts and applications in PHP without having to put any commercial threat into much consideration.