In a recent post to a blog that was reported in our news, author Cliff Wells claims that the light has gone out on LAMP. I have addressed enough of these articles in the past–as have many others who know a log more about technology than I do–and I am not really going to address another one here. In fact, I am only going to use it for that most human of human forms of expression: imitation.
More precisely, I am going to “borrow” the title of our news item and shuffle it a bit around. The question that I have been asking myself lately is not whether LAMP is lost, but whether we, the community, are losing control over it.
I'm sure you don't need to hear me say–again–that the PHP market has changed dramatically over the last year or so. In fact, I'm willing to bet that many of you are thinking something along the lines of “duh!” right this very moment. To be perfectly honest, it bothers me a bit that so many seem to think that companies have affected the market, because, in my opinion, that's just impossible. Anyone who deludes himself into thinking that a large market can be affected at any level by the action of a small number of entities–regardless of how big it is–has been reading far too many books on economics (or, perhaps, far too few).
In reality, the corporate attitude towards PHP is the result of a shift in the PHP market itself–because there are more “enterprise-level” users in the PHP space, so called “enterprise” software providers are falling all over each other to ensure that their applications are compatible with PHP. In addition, many of these companies are contributing to the community by sponsoring–and in some cases hiring outright–many prominent PHP folks for their work on (or on beahalf of) the language.
Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this–in fact, it's great to see so many smart people working directly on the core to not only improve PHP as it exists today, but also to introduce the exciting new features that will become part of it in the not-so-distant future.
The problem with this reality, however, is one of strategic direction. We have been lucky, so far, that both the companies that have expressed an interest in PHP and the folks who have been doing the work have done so with complete respect for the community and in the spirit of a strong sense of ethics. As much as I sometimes hear people complain about the fact that large companies are trying to influence the PHP development process, I firmly believe that we are better off today thanks–at least in part–to their contributions.
