Microsoft and PHP

Man, what a weird 24 hours it’s been. So yesterday, through one of the Geeklog mailing lists, I got this email from a Microsoft rep. Then I woke up this morning to the news of a $44 billion buy-out offer from Microsoft for Yahoo!. This is being covered from all angles in various tech sites like Slashdot but I think the one angle I haven’t seen yet is what does this mean for PHP?

For those living in a cave, Zend and Microsoft partnered over a year and a half ago to improve native support for PHP under Windows and IIS. Yahoo! is an online search and advertising Giant cracking out a ton of PHP code and employing a number of PHP notables. I mean c’mon, could you ever have thought that a guy like Rasmus Lerdorf might actually be employed by Microsoft? These recent events have me asking a lot of questions but I guess the thing I can’t help but feel is a bit icky. The parts of me entrenched in open source software hate to see this but I can’t really quantify why. Maybe this is a good thing for PHP? Maybe there will be zero impact? What about technologies at Yahoo!? Will we see their servers running open source operating system have Windows installed over them? Will all that PHP code Yahoo! has produced be running under IIS? Those are the things that come to my mind immediately . I’m sure some of you in the PHP community can come up with even better questions to discuss.