PHP's Relationship with Commercial Entities

I started this blog post as a rant about Apple, so I’m saving that for later on and I thought I’d start with a quick thank you to all those groups and entities involved indirectly with PHP.

The PHP project relies on donations to provide our service infrastructure, this is in the form of hardware and hosting from both individual companies and hosting companies to provide collocation.

We can also thank various hosting companies for providing local country mirrors for documentation and downloads. You can find a list of the mirrors here, the general rule is two per country so if you want to be a mirror then you’re more than welcome.

Along with hardware and hosting we also get some donations from companies in the way of software and employee time and there are a few notable mentions here.

The first huge contribution we have is IBM, they’ve provide a vast quantity of tests that have helped increase our code coverage significantly. Along with these tests they also provide some developers to work on their database extensions and most recently they donated a PPC server for performing tests.

Next up is Microsoft who provide developers in the way of Pierre to work with PHP on Windows along with other developers to work on the new mssql extension. For those working on the PHP Project they will also provide MSDN accounts to obtain the latest software for testing on Windows.

Microsoft also host meetups, the most recent one was in London hosted by Will Coleman who got together some members of the PHP Community and asked for feedback on how Microsoft could improved their relationship with PHP. This was a great opportunity to ask for Microsoft’s help with certain extensions. Prior to that the Microsoft Web Development Summit in Redmond was another great time to talk with the various entities within Microsoft about the way they interact with PHP.

From Sun we have staff working on improving PHP running on Solaris and using suncc along with all the maintenance we have for the MySQL stuff. Sun even contributed mysqlnd which is a native MySQL driver written just for PHP rather than relying on libmysql.

Yahoo! allows their employees to work on PHP, we’ve had plenty of contributions to APC and some of the core stuff from Sara and Rasmus.

Not forgetting Zend who allow Dmitry to work on the engine and Stas to contribute, while they use to do a lot more in the past, it can be said that without Zend, PHP wouldn't be where it is today.

Oracle, Facebook and Digg sponsor developers to work on PHP, their contribution help improves the PHP core and the extensions they work on.

And last but not least the smaller companies who allow their staff to work on PHP, these are companies you've probably never heard but we thank them none the less.

So overall a big thanks to all those companies and more importantly the volunteers who give back to PHP.

Comments

[Johannes Schlüter]

Whiole mentioning my employer (so I don't have to complain ;-)) You missed an important group of companies: There are quite a few small companies who sponsor different developers to do some work on PHP. But even more important are the individual developers who spent lots of free leisure time unpaid for working on PHP. That group of people is actually the one driving PHP. Companies come, companies go depending on quarterly results and other "business reasons", but these people stay.

[Scott]

Yeah, I did neglect to mention the small companies such as the one I work for that allow me to use a small amount of my time to work on PHP.

I'll edit the blog report shortly, it's actually a lead up to an Apple rant.

[Business Loans]

This is the 1st time I'm hearing of the PHP Project. Thanks for the info, I will look into this further.

[Adesso Mini Keyboard]

nice idea
but iam not good in php :(

[lace wedding dresses]

PHP is the hearth of online business ! I admire these writers in sharing their views and or opinions that can enlighten the mind of the readers.

[Anavar]

I have always been interested in php, so this post is perfect for me. Thanks for all the information. Greetings