Absolutely, they should merge efforts

We do not need both. The folks at Facebook only have their best interests in mind and that's alright. However ZEND has continued to develop a product with the best interests of the entire development community.

Right but what Facebook implemented are mostly things that PHP users wanted since many years ago. Zend has not been doing much new work on the PHP engine in the latest years. It seems they finally waken.

Totally agree with you sir Manuel, but that ZEND preserved the state of PHP wasn't a bad thing because this allows the new developers, the students to understand the PHP. In this days, is very hard for a new developer to keep up with the evolution of PHP. They are very confused and when they post something they get contradictory replies. Try to look at PDO PERSISTENT and you will see that this is very painful for a beginner. Also they are encouraged to use OOP but the OOP is a hard thing without understanding the procedural language. Along with OOP comes a lot of new terms, like traits, namespaces. Also the ported to PDO is a tricky thing for a beginner. We are in the situation that a new version comes up every year. Yes is a very good thing for us, and we truly need that features. I don't say that the PHP state need to be preserved but after a major update is needed a "stop" to allow everyone to keep up. We all speak about code portability from developer to developer, but we forgot that very talented developers can be wasted in this situation, at least in my point of view.