[TazeTSchnitzel]

As much as their technological contributions are appreciated, the slow creep of Zend branding (and its own, different licensing) into PHP is not a good thing. Opcache is part of PHP now, yet it's Zend branded everywhere and has a bus factor of one (nobody can understand the source code except a Zend employee - every time anything's changed in the engine, Opcache breaks and he has to go and fix it). Similarly, it's not good that the Zend Engine is marked with a Zend Technologies copyright notice either. It's the core PHP runtime, yet if you read the notices you'd think it was some proprietary product donated by or licensed from them.

[smt88]

Zend now has a much larger, better-funded competitor with better engineers -- Facebook. I agree that it was a bad thing that Zend was trying to dominate the PHP community, but there's no longer a monopoly.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Facebook doesn't touch the original PHP interpreter.

[revelation]

In a language where the rules are defined by what one implementation does, once an alternative implementation has the necessary critical mass, that becomes the language.

So I guess HipHop will simply leapfrog them.

[smt88]

If I remember correctly, Facebook was submitting PHP patches for a long time, especially when they concerned security.

And once there's 100% parity between HHVM and Zend's interpreter, why would I, as a user, care whether the competitors are working on the same product?

Honestly, by creating a spec and a new implementation from scratch, Facebook has done far more (in far less time) for PHP than Zend has in the last 5+ years.

[ukandy]

Zend Engine has been under it's own Zend license for 15 years I reckon. The web would probably look very different without Zend.

[juliangregorian]

Pure open source doesn't seem to exist in this decade; all large enough projects seem to die without corporate sponsorship.

[pjmlp]

It was already like that with the projects that hit big.

Linux got lots of contributions from companies that would rather invest into it than paying UNIX licenses.

Eventually it got lots of support from the likes of IBM and Intel, because its existence suited their business.

GCC got lots of support when UNIX vendors started charging for their SDKs and smaller shops invested into it.

Likewise for many other projects.

[thejosh]

Of course, most good opensource have a corporate arm behind them, which helps fund development.

[singingfish]

Perl is thoroughly alive, large and not excessively corporate sponsored. Then again it's largely on the backchannel at the moment.