In a link from PHPEverywhere today, Marco Tabini has a new posting on his weblog concerning the ever-growing comercial side of PHP.

Another event - much more low-key - seems to have taken over all the buzz these days. The signs have been there for a while - particularly if one reads between the lines of some of this summer's most interesting threads on the PHP internals mailing list - but the casus belli seems to have come about with this interview that PHP Magazine published very recently in which a few interesting comments on the origins of PHP are attributed to Zeev and Andi, which basically boil down to them claiming that they "invented the language."

[...] Thus, in my opinion it is only natural that Zend is changing the spin they put on their products and their role in the PHP world. This is not to say that they are lying - as much as PHP is a community effort built upon the work of many volunteers, I doubt that it would be where it is today were it not for Andi's and Zeev's contributions. Zend is simply trying to speak a different language that appeals to a different category of people, much like MySQL has done in recent months. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing more enterprise buzzwords - like ROI and TCO - appear in Zend literature, whether online or off.

It's an interesting topic - and one that seemed to (as noted above) sneak up on the community as a whole. Not that some of these changes are a bad thing, but others argue that most of these changes (financial vs. community based) could, very possibly lead PHP down the wrong path...