ThePHP.cc: The Future of Zend

In a recent post on their own site, thePHP.cc has shared some of their own perspectives about the recent future of Zend announcement. For those that aren't aware, the company that acquired Zend several years ago - Rogue Wave - announced their decision to discontinue their support of the Zend Framework project.

Last week, Zeev Suraski, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Enrico Zimuel and Dmitry Stogov, all well-known members of the international PHP community, announced that they will leave Zend, which has been part of Rogue Wave since 2015.

The stated reason is Rogue Wave's strategic decision to focus on the development of Zend Server. If you read between the lines, this implies that Rogue Wave is not going to continue or support the development of the Zend Engine (the core of PHP responsible for compiling and executing code), their IDE Zend Studio, and Zend Framework.

Of course, it is perfectly valid to make money off an Open Source project. This, however, implies at least a moral obligation to give back to said project. Rogue Wave, it seems, will now terminate the symbiotic relationship between PHP and Zend.

The author (Stefan Priebsch) talks about "lip service" not being enough when a company wants to make money from customers but aren't willing to help with the development of the underlying software. He also mentions several other Zend-related products that have a bit more quietly gotten the axe over the years since the acquisition. He wonders about the "downsizing" this could cause in the PHP community given ZF's impact and how, despite this being a large setback for the project, he sees its future as promising given the people involved and the projects around it.