The idea is to make a unified, concentrated effort to drop PHP4 support and drive PHP5 adoption in the year 2008. Think of it. All CMS, forum and framework projects going completely over to PHP5 on a set date! This would be like a bomb dropping on the web hosting world and cause ripples throughout the open source world.

They point out some of the projects that are leaning either way from ezPublish hanging on to PHP4 and apps like Drupal that have embraced PHP5. In fact, it's the Drupal group that's written up the proposal on how it would all go down - the "Go PHP5 Effort".

It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The open source PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed open source PHP projects have all agreed that effective 5 February 2008, any new feature release will have a minimum required PHP version no older than PHP 5.2.0.

There's tons of comments to the proposal in both parties (and some in between noting that there are already several PHP4 applications that run quite happily on PHP5).