Lukas Smith has posted some more of his thoughts on what Open Source is (and isn't) and how it applies to Zend's IDE efforts.

Zend has officially proposed a PHP IDE for eclipse (PHPEclipse is not an official Eclipse project) and they are certainly poring in development resources which cost them real money. The end product will however not be released in its entirety as open source. Even worse the parts that will not will not be specced out until the last second. I am of course talking about the debugger.

Now I have stated in my last few posts that there is an open source protocol and implementation for scripting language debuggers. Are these by definition technically superior? Of course not. It could very well be that Zend's debugger protocol and server component are superior. However if that is the case why isn't Zend publishing the protocol so that we can judge and compare?

He also notes that, while the protocol he's previously proposed isn't perfect, there's still advantages to using the XDebug code. It can be altered, adapted, and even integrated with the Zend tool with just a little nudge in the right direction. Lukas' final advice to Zend - "it's not too late to go Open Source".