RE: [PHP] The future of PHP

There are big players who have an eye on the open-source market right now, IBM being the biggest contributor. HP recently released their own Linux version on their desktop PCs and is marketing them as we speak. Microsoft is planning on giving away just part of their source code in their future products to software developers. Everyone has felt the heat on Open Source technology, and everyone knows it is the way to go. The only thing that is missing from most Open Source products, probably excluding PHP, is user-friendliness. There are a lot of computer illiterate people out there that have gotten used to the click and drag features that make using an application so easy, but they never dream of going into a command line and typing in something. Right now Linux is easy to use thanks to the abundance of different GUIs out there, but there is no standard, like Windows has. Also it is harder to set-up for newbies than Windows is (not really, but for the newbie it's a whole different world). It is a new concept that users must grab in order to make good use of it. There must be a way that people can link MS-like features into Linux a bit more so that at least it will make it easier for people to make that transition over to a different OS and try it out. After it has the market share it needs, users will have gotten used to Linux or BSD or whatever and we can do what MS does, promote a bunch of Linux-specific features into the OS. By that time they will have grabbed the concept of "free" so much that Windows would sound ridiculously pricey (especially the licensing). MS can't afford to give it's OS away for free, just like it could give away it's IE browser and break Netscape. That's why Open Source is the first real challenge for MS in 15 years. THEN follows the marketing, where everyone will be backing up Linux because of it's popularity and low cost, compared to Windows. And we'll see Bill Gates crawling on his knees and selling his Ferraris to pay his mortgage. Wouldn't I love to see that, just kidding. Until Linux gets better at certain things, I think I have no choice but to stick with Windows for now (especially in the design area). Anyway, that's my two cents worth. Navid P.S. -- When I say Linux, I mean all Open Source products, including PHP. Linux is just the driving force. And Christopher, keep up the promotion of PHP, you have some great ideas. I want it to grow as much as you do. Thanks :) -----Original Message----- From: Manuel Lemos [mailto:mlemos@acm.org] Sent: Friday, August 24, 2001 12:57 PM To: php-general@lists.php.net Subject: Re: [PHP] The future of PHP Hello, Christopher Cm Allen wrote: > > > > > I'm afraid that PHP is not yet very credible in that world. The truth is > > there is not great marketing force behind PHP like there is Sun behind > > Java or Microsoft behind .Net > > Good point, and how does one go about marketing a language that is > open-source? If you don't know it is because you are not very motivated to do it. So, the first step is to convince and motivate yourself that PHP needs to be marketed. As for what to do, instead of suggesting new ideas, I would rather recall some old ideas that always seemed to work well. For instance, provide PHP users compensation. It does not need to be financial compensation. It may be moral compensation as long as it is real compensation. For instance, if I am not mistaken, Guido Van Rossum, the Python creator, sponsored a contest to develop software development tools with cash prizes. Only a few won, but the contest attracted a lot of people and was even mentioned in prestiged software development magazines like Dr. Dobbs. This required some investment, but if you look around you will not have much trouble to find a sponsor. Another point is that they managed to get the media on their side. It seems that in the PHP community there is little effort to appeal to media. That is a major waste of oppiortunity because they can provide some much marketing for free. One free way to provide compensation to any PHP user is to promote their work. 2 years ago I started a repository of PHP Classes of objects that basically allow anybody to contribute regardless of the quality and utility that you may attribute to what is contributed. The point is that once users that anybody can have some fame to have his work exposed to a large PHP audience (over 40.000 subscribers), they want to contribute as well and the site grows thanks to the moral compensation that it offers to any PHP user. There are other class repositories, like the official PHP PEAR repository, but the scope is different because the contributions are not accepted arbitrarily, so you don't get as many contributors. Other than that, PHP resources sites like these should be officially linked altogether with things like Web rings. It would cause a much better impression to newcomers or ceptic people as it would make PHP more credible exposing the real level of support that the whole PHP community can provide. Unfortunately, the maintainers of PHP main site and Zend site do not seem to agree that it would be a good idea to promote other PHP resources sites with banners to pointing to them like what is done with Web rings. Ok, these are just a few ideas that would help PHP to be better marketed. They are not new and have already been discussed before. It is up to the people that have more active roles in the PHP community to open their minds and pick them up. > I do it by not allowing FP like extensions on my server's. All of my custom > apps are php or if need be I switch to C/perl. > If I get pushed hard enough I will do c++ :) > > By your own words though , the volume of users of a non-marketed php, > compared to the users of marketed Java et al. speaks for itself. > Php holds its own.. But for how long? > What if a group of developers/designers started marketing PHP? Marketing does wonders. I should not need to to tell you that. One problem seems to be some people in the PHP community have some kind of aversion to the idea of that somebody can make money from free software. That way you are ruling out people that can do a lot of good to the growth of the PHP market. I think it is a matter of being more open minded. The more opportunities you provide to others, the greater are the chances that opportunities benefit your goals, in this case a a wider acceptance of PHP making it more credible to people that basically ignore it. ok, that's just me trying to be more constructive. :-) Regards, Manuel Lemos -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-general-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For additional commands, e-mail: php-general-help@lists.php.net To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net