Zend’s Agreement With Microsoft

We have received many questions about Zend’s recently announced agreement with Microsoft, particularly in the light of the announcement last week of the Microsoft - Novell relationship and the questions raised about that. There has been substantial talk that Microsoft has been waging its patent portfolio against Unix and Linux providers, and that Novell was the company that capitulated and sold its soul.

But the agreement between Zend and Microsoft does not have any of this potential for controversy. There are no reseller components, no IP issues, no exclusivity clauses. Just collaboration on technology improvements, which will be contributed to the community under the PHP license. During the joint briefings of press, analysts and customers that we did together with Microsoft, the rationale for both of us was quite straightforward and clear:

- Microsoft would like the whole world to move to .Net but knows that will not happen, and it wants to push the Windows platform to PHP developers as well.

- Zend has a great interest to let PHP developers have the greatest amount of choice of computing platforms and Windows is obviously one of the major platforms to support.

In this interview with Infoworld Andi summarizes Zend’s logic once more. And here is an interview with Andi on Microsoft’s Port 25. And in TechCrunch, Marshall Kerkpatrick provides a credible perspective on Microsoft’s strategic objectives.

In the meantime developers interested in the progress are downloading the preview of the technology improvements here at Zend’s website.