According to this new post on Slashdot, one of the lead developers of the Zend Engine has quit.

Jani Taskinen, one of the lead developers of the Zend Engine (the engine that powers PHP), as well as a lead developer for the thread safety system and other core components of the PHP project, has quit in a relatively cryptic message to the php-internals mailing list. Jani has been involved with PHP for about 6 years and his loss will undoubtedly be a big blow for the PHP project.

As the news.php.net server is apparently slowing down amazingly from the Slashdot exposure, here's a paste of the message for those interested. It's definitely a great loss to the community as a whole, and here's to hoping that someone will step up and take a place in this unfortunate hole in the development process.

If you'd like to find out more about Jani Taskinen, check out this summary of some of his contributions.