In this new post to his blog, Marcus Borger looks a companies and their relationship to the PHP project - more specifically Zend and their close ties with PHP and its source.

Why can Zend not simply change the license of the Zend Engine to PHP License? Why do we want this? Because it creates issues with using PHP. And we do not even inform people about it, because we are silent about this fact. So is there a reason why this has not happened already long ago?

He points out the two different sides to consider - how they (Zend and their employees) have contributed to the language and its development and what the license says about ownership of the main engine. Andi Gutmans (of Zend) has made a comment on the post about why the licensing is set up how it is and how it relates to the TSRM library.

Andi Gutmans has posted some of his own thoughts about the recent Zend Server beta release over on his Blogspot blog:

As I alluded in my New Year's post we've been very busy working on a new product line which today we are unveiling as Zend Server. Zend Server is not a Zend Core or Zend Platform derivative (although it uses a small amount of those components, mostly enhanced) rather it's a new approach on how we want to develop, distribute, and service our production products.

He talks about some of Zend's reasoning behind the project such as the need they saw in the community for a good, easy to install full web stack that can be relied on to provide solid, dependable performance. The entire setup is free of dependencies making it idea for a "drop in" kind of package for those needing an environment on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.

You can find out more information about this new Zend offering on this page on the Zend website.

Zend posted an official press release earlier today about some shifting happening in their senior management. Two individuals, Andi Gutmans and Mark Burton, have taken on new roles with the company.

Zend Technologies, the PHP Company, today announced that it has appointed Andi Gutmans, Zend co-founder, as its chief executive officer. Gutmans was most recently senior vice president for R&D and alliances at Zend, as well as chief technical officer. It also named Mark Burton, formerly executive vice president of worldwide sales at MySQL, as executive chairman. Harold Goldberg, who held the position of CEO at Zend Technologies during the past two years, will leave to pursue other opportunities.

The press release includes comments on both individuals. The PHP community is supportve of the changes too. Congratulations to Andi and Mark for their appointments to these new positions!

As mentioned by Ivo Jansch, Andi Gutmans (of Zend) responded to the recent speculation about a buyout of the company in his keynote address at this year's php|tek conference:

Andi explained the reason: they want to become cashflow positive, in order to remain independent. The news should be interpreted in a positive way, the future now looks bright, Zend products will not be affected and life goes on. An acquisition of Zend is not happening in the near future.

TechCrunch had suggested that the recent large amounts of layoffs could have been in an effort to ready the company for a buy out from one of many proposed major players.

Andi Gutmans of Zend has posted about the next step in his personal growth on the internet - a personal site/blog of his own over at andigutmans.com.

For years I've wanted to run a personal Web site but never found the time to do it. A couple of weeks ago a few Zenders and I started leasing a dedicated server which gave us each a bit more hosting flexibility. Once we got the machine up and running I decided it was finally time to actually launch my own personal Web site.

He lists the technologies he's using including the Zend Framework, the Zend_Gdata component and the Zend_Cache (for local caching of his blog feeds from Blogger).

As announce on the C7Y website today, Andi Gutmans will be presenting a keynote speech at this year's php|tek 2008 conference.

We're happy to announce that Andi Gutmans, co-founder of Zend and an active member of the PHP development group, will officially kick off our upcoming php|tek 2008 Conference, which will take place in Chicago, IL, between May 20th and May 23rd, 2008.

His talk will be titled PHP State of the Union: Eco-System and Technology and will take a look at the ever-changing state of the PHP community and a look ahead to possible future developments.

The speaker list for this year's AjaxWorld Conference & Expo has been announced and one of Zend's own, Andi Gutmans is on the list:

more than a dozen high-caliber speakers lined up by SYS-CON Events to speak in the "RIAs in Action" track at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West taking place next month at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA - one of just ten simultaneous content-rich tracks at biggest version yet of the world's leading AJAX, Rich Internet Applications & Web 2.0 event.

Andi will be giving a talk with Bradford Cottel covering the creation of rich internet applications with the Zend Framework as a backend. They'll introduce the language and how the framework makes it simple to create a rich application, including a demo app.

As mentioned in several places (such as a post on php|architect's website), the list of "40 Innovative IT People to Watch Under the Age of 40" has been released and Zend's own Andi Gutmans has made the list.

From the official press release:

Zend Technologies, Inc., The PHP Company, today announced that IDG's Computerworld, the premier source of IT industry news and analysis, selected Andi Gutmans, co-CTO and co-founder of Zend, as one of its "40 Innovative IT People to Watch, Under the Age of 40." Gutmans was selected for the award by a panel of Computerworld editors for his pioneering work with PHP 3, continued work with PHP 4 and 5, advancement of business critical rich internet applications, further development of PHP and Java integration, and, most recently, significant contributions to the open source collaboration project Zend Framework.

You can read more about Andi and the other nominees over in the ComputerWorld article highlighting him and the 39 other honorees.

Nick Halstead is conducting a poll of his own to try to figure out who the online community thinks are the "Top 10 Programmers of All Time".

My original list was based upon my programming background and was purely my own opinion and I did not expect everyone to agree with it. What I thought I would do this time round was to give everyone a chance to voice their opinion. [...] have pre-filled 18 programmers from my original list plus those that were suggested in the comments.

You can vote on a wide range of developers, including several PHP-associated once like Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski.

The Zend Developer Zone points to a new podcast done from the Dr. Dobbs Journal folks with Jon Erickson talking to Andi Gutmans of Zend about a wide range of PHP topics:

In this 5 minute podcast, Jon and Andi talk about a wide variety of topics. They touch on PHP Scalability, Web Services, Zend Framework and how Zend implemented the Lucene search engine in PHP.

Cal also mentions their discussion of the BIRT reporting functionality that is newly integrated with the Zend Platform product.

You can grab the full podcast here.