Re: The PHP Platform

I don't really have an issue with the Zend people making money from their products. The concern I have is that they sell perfoamance enhancing products. Because they are selling these, I worry that performance in the base Zend engine will not be / is not a primary concern. I think that performance should be a top priority for the 'base' engine. People outside of Zend are contributing a good amount of time to creating extensions, writing PEAR modules, and promoting PHP, and , in my opinion , these efforts are being used by Zend who are holding back on performance. Yes... the optimizer is free. But it doesn't always have to be. I like PHP, I use PHP, I use PHP for clients work, so yes.... I make money off of PHP. I expect that the Zend psople can as well, without holding back on the community that helped them get where they are today. I've got some biases here. I was a subscriber, for a time to the developer's pachage that they had towards the beginning. For $600 a year I got the Encoder, the debug server and 2 client licenses. They had a pay by month option and I selected this, as my company wasn't going to reimburse me for this expense. When my bank got bought and I had to get use a new card to keep up on the payments no one could do it. I emailed the people who handled the credit card transactiosn, and I emailed Zend. I got no responsse what-so-ever, but a lot of emails telling me they couldn't bill my card (all of which I replied to asking how to change my card info). I'm glad you have had good expeirience with them, 'cause I haven't. And the package that made the mose sense to me, they no longer offer. Medvitz Dave Mertens wrote: > On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 07:32:47PM -0400, medvitz wrote: >> The issue I have with PHP is that the people in charge have reasons for >> not >> implementing performance enhancements in the base code. They charge a >> fair >> amount for add-ons that increases performance drastically. I could >> actually argue that extensibility and performance on the back end aren't >> what they should be for this reason. >> >> Not that I want to make enemies here, but I think this is a realistic >> criticism. Not to mention that the Qt license that is used prevents >> anyone from making extensions and selling them w/o an additional license >> from the >> Zend people. So they are able to make money off of the hard work of all >> of the module contributors, which I think really blows. > > So if i understand what your saying you don't like that fact the Zend had > write an (very) good engine for PHP4 and now is making some money with > it?? > > Don't forget Zend is a commercial company that is doing a lot for the open > source community. Without them you didn't had PHP4! > > Without all the Zend optimalisations (but with the free Zend Optimzer > (You've installed it, right?!)) PHP4 has a good performance. With the > money they make with their products like Zend Encoder, Zend Cache, etc > they can continue developing on the Zend Engine. > > They don't force you to but their products. They only say that they can > really speed up your code. > Companies where i work (a official gold microsoft partner ;-( ) has also > bought the Zend products. > > My boss thinks the Zend products are very cheap in comparisment with > Microsoft products. > > Microsoft is doing the same thing. They provide you with a 'free' IIS > webserver, but they have also products that enhance IIS like Commerce > Server, Content Server, etc. > > The fact that a commercial company like Zend is working on PHP is for a > large number of companies very important. Most open-source projects don't > have a proper helpdesk. Zend is providing a very good helpdesk. > > But all this have two sides. While we (PHP developers) build upon PHP4, > and make money with the applications we write with it. And Zend is making > money with other Zend products and they make sure PHP is good enough for > companies. > > So don't trap Zend into the ground. Because of them you can program OOP in > PHP! > > That all from me.. > > Dave Mertens