Funny

Sounds like someone is losing more web market share to me... Let's be honest... most PHP programmers wouldn't sell their OSS soul to Microsoft just to earn a few more pennies a month... ok I wouldn't do such a thing... I cannot really speak for the rest of the community.

The bottom line is, Microsoft is just trying to gain market share, Vista screwed them in desktop market share, I know of more than a few companies who never upgraded, or upgraded to other OSS or even MAC solutions, instead of vista. In these transgressions, a lot of server infrastructure was migrated off of IIS, Windows server, ect. As companies see the benefit of OSS and how inexpensive it is to run, especially at the server level, they are switching to OSS solutions.

Well said. I am glad that there are few who understands that in this forum.

The OSS soul is a bit wider than this.

IMHO, in order to feed our OSS soul, we need to feed ourselves, and our geek behaviors, and all sorts of cool stuffs.

As well as that, the economy is shrinking, the more we have solid support, the better, either through OSS technologies or with some sort of win-win approach.

PHP being OSS we could gently switch here to there anytime, and still be alive anyways, and Microsoft is aware of that, so I don't think this as a trap, but a way of empowering the whole thing, and win by a change.

Cheers,

Ernani

"The bottom line is, Microsoft is just trying to gain market share"

Yes, that is exactley right.

But where is the problem? Microsoft are a business, a very successful one, who's ultimate aim is to make money.

"who's ultimate aim is to make money" - from the contribution of open source PHP Developers. I am sure few of them have put a considerable effort in getting PHP platform up free for the community. And now some one else wants to make money on that and community supports it. Great!

In the same way that Red Hat make money from people using their distribution of Linux? Where there are users their is profit to be made.

If this is somehow abusing the open source community and the developers who have spent their time creating the PHP platform, then every commercial PHP developer or anyone who makes money from using PHP is also guilty, myself included.

Microsoft are providing a product and a service, you do not have to pay for it or use it. If a business decides to use Microsoft to host their PHP systems rather than Linux that is their choice and their budget to spend.

They may also find that with their existing in-house knowledge and familiarity using Windows rather than Linux it is a cost saving despite the license costs.

I do not see how this in any way translates into Microsoft making money from the PHP open source community.

@Andy "In the same way that Red Hat make money from people using their distribution of Linux? Where there are users their is profit to be made."

Red Hat split distribution channels, when they introduced Red Hat EL, they also introduced Fedora.

You do not have to pay to run Red Hat EL, you have to pay if your want to Update it.

And if you want to run Red Hat EL for free look at Centos, same distro different name.

I wave the FreeBSD flag personally.