RE: [PHP] Re: PHP in corporate settings?

Evan: Thanks 'n' a tip o'the hat! <grin> I certainly have no problem evangelising, especially for something that actually WORKS as documented. How do the authors feel about the idea of evangelising? How best to consolidate support round those who created, maintain, and document PHP? The best approach, I think, is to lock ranks together round those gentles and offer our support and contributions toward an effort of making the marketplace more PHP-aware. Personally, I'd like nothing better than to see a safe, secure, fully-featured toolkit-to-success like PHP outshine IIS/ASP in glossy print. Fact for fact, feature-for-feature comparisons, extolling the richness of PHP as opposed to ASP, praising the documentation: a side-by-side comparison tells the whole story. No offence to Perl programmers (I count myself as one, sometimes :-) but there are appropriate places for rich, intelligent scripting languages and then there's the web with its own rules. Mind, I rely heavily on Perl, but it does things like keep mirror servers mirrored, watch over NFS mounts (I'm running 4 VPN's to sites in N America and Netherlands), and generally keeping the shop together. But it's PITA to use for interactive, EBusiness-type web stuff. PHP (to me) seems much more appropriate and easy to use. Ok, we could toss a barb or two in the ads like "If you'd used Apache/PHP instead of IIS/ASP your network wouldn't be shut down due to Code Red today" just for schitzengiggles. But just one or two :-) I'd hate to suffer a loss of credibility due to appearing to be strident about it. M$ people being shrill about the virtues of M$ to me is the biggest turnoff about ASP or any other M$ product: not necessarily the shoddy workmanship of M$ in general. (You can tell I run a strictly ABM [anything but Microsoft] shop.) And Lord knows, if a shyte product like SAP can get TV airtime and corporate notice (even though after 2 years of tracking installs I've YET to hear of an implementation success story--I have loads of disaster stories) and zillions of dollars in revenue (do we smell a scam?), a LEGITIMATE, works-as-promised product like PHP should have little problem gaining notice with a few good advert placements. One would hope. Oftimes, the corporate marketplace seems to have a taste for doodoo and there's little one can do about that except keep plugging. Ladies and gentlemen: any further thoughts? A good product deserves good recognition. Any strong marketing/psychologist types out there with some ideas how to put forth PHP's strengths without sounding shrill? Any ideas from the PHP authors/contributors/caretakers? Evan, good show on the site to collect contacts to support the idea of promoting PHP as a much better, safer, richer alternative. A central rallying point is always a good start. -B -----Original Message----- From: Evan Nemerson [mailto:evan@coeus-group.com] Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2001 9:04 PM To: Bill Farrell; php-general@lists.php.net Subject: Re: [PHP] Re: PHP in corporate settings? Bill has hit it right on! Programmers all over the world have already recognized that PHP is a superior language, and open-source is not the root of all evil (as M$ would have us believe). However, many (most?) execs do not listen to reason, but rather only to TV and glossy ads. Therefore, I propose we fight fire with fire! Lets band together and form a web site not altogether unlike LinuxFund.org. However, instead of development of new technology, our site could focus on the spread of PHP, or perhaps open source technology. Get our own credit card, ask for donations, be those donations money or time. We could use this money to fund ad-campaigns. Ad-campaigns targeted not at programmers who already know the merit of PHP (and open-source in general), but rather the "Big Corporate Executive" who has the power to make or break PHP. The ads could go in magazines like Forbes, Fortune, etc. instead of Open Magazine. If you are interested in this, either helping make the site, providing expertise in other areas (such as marketing), or would just be willing to make a donation, visit a page I just set up: http://www.coeus-group.com/AdCamp.php . I'll consider this post to be a kind of market analysis. I sincerly hope that you are as interested- and willing- as I. Evan Nemerson evan@coeus-group.com