The Future of the Zend Engine and the Zend Framework

In the past 20 years, I've been at the forefront of the development of the Zend Engine - the 'kernel' of PHP - both personally and via my team.  We led many of the key advancements in the language runtime, including most recently the development of the updated brain that made the wonder that is PHP 7 - and many other things over the years.  We're very proud of these contributions, and I believe they had a critical impact in both the rapid proliferation of PHP in the past - and for keeping it competitive in recent years.  Other folks in my team have led the development of other prominent components in the PHP ecosystem - namely Zend Framework, Apigility and Zend Expressive - which too are being used by hundreds of thousands of companies.

In the last three years - after Zend was acquired - we continued to do this work under the umbrella of Rogue Wave software, for which I'm very thankful.  However, Rogue Wave has recently taken a strategic decision to focus its efforts on the Zend Server part of the Zend portfolio.  Consequently, I'm announcing that my team and I - including Dmitry Stogov, Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Enrico Zimuel will be leaving the company and looking for new opportunities.  This isn't going to happen immediately, but the decision has been taken.

As all of us still care very much both about PHP as well as the Zend Framework ecosystem, one of the options we're evaluating is finding a new home for these contributions, to keep both our planned contributions to PHP 8 and beyond on track, and the ongoing development of ZF and Zend Expressive thriving.  One of the reasons for this announcement - which is coming well ahead of our actual departure date - is to explore this possibility.

If you work for a company that you believe be interested in supporting such an effort, I'd love to hear from you at zeev@php.net.