Lukas Smith has a new post on his blog today that looks at an interesting topic that's been kind of brushed under the run with all of the popularity of the latest release of PEAR - "What is the future of PEAR?"

The topic at hand is the future, or lack of one, of PEAR. PHP5 in many ways was what PEAR has been waiting for. But PEAR was never able to shed its legacy baggage and to really because a first choice PHP5 repository. At the same time however PEAR's rate of adoption and scope has increased dramatically. So did we go wrong?

I do not think we went wrong. We did the best for our user base. ItÂ’s just that for anyone willing to move, there are greener pastures emerging: most notably eZ components and the Zend framework. I am quite certain that the user experience with these projects will be much better than it ever was in PEAR. However as they commit themselves to their code on a much higher level than any maintainer they might also be more hesitant to add features compared to PEAR package maintainers.

He continues on talking about "the IP problem" that could exist (as Wez mentioned) with changes people make to the code on these projects. He does look hopefully at the future of PEAR, though - especially in light of the 1.4 installer...