PHP vs. Zend paranoia?

Paranoia or not. PHP needs extensions and PHP needs an enthusiastic crowd of developers willing to write such extensions. As it is today, we do not have a well-documented API for writing such extensions. People have to muddle along looking at existing code. Outside of the extension API, PHP is one of the best-documented open source projects out there because of a very studious documentation team. Now, why don't we have a well-documented extension API? When the Zend API was initially documented and put up on Zend's web site, I asked if it couldn't be put up on php.net? I don't recall what the reply was, but it never did happen. And I don't see any sort of improvement happening in the state of that documentation. It hasn't changed much since the initial release and as such it is completely out of date today. You may call it political, but people flock to contribute to PHP whereas I don't see people flocking to contribute to Zend Technologies Inc. Probably precisely because they see it as more of a company than an open source project. It is the same "unfair perception", as I think you called it, issue that people have with the license of the engine itself. But if that perception is keeping us from growing and improving because people shy away from contributing due to a perception (even if it is unfair) that their work is going directly to benefit a commercial organization, then we all lose in the end. PHP needs Zend, obviously, but Zend certainly also needs PHP. This relationship goes both ways and it needs to be carefully cultivated. Let's come up with a decent solution to this that is as maintenance-free as possible. I will personally commit to doing whatever onoing maintenance work it may end up causing. Technically it shouldn't be all that hard to build a set of macros that let an extension look and feel like a PHP extension and still build as a standalone Zend extension. -Rasmus