On the Zend Developer Zone today, Andi Gutmans has written up a new post that, in light of a recent announcement from Microsoft about "going open source" with some of their products, asks what it means for the web and for the PHP community specifically.

Today Microsoft announced a significant initiative which aims to provide the developer community with access to a large number of Microsoft protocols and file formats. [...] With Microsoft opening up their specifications under the OSP, open-source communities like Zend Framework are now able to build such solutions without fear of litigation. There are many other areas where it will benefit open-source projects including Samba (SMB), FreeTDS (SQL Server), Mono (.NET), and others...

He shares his thoughts on the winners (Microsoft themselves, Open Source community) and losers (Microsoft's competitors, Linux) on the deal and the beneficial impact he thinks it will all have on the PHP.