PHP is always thought of as an open source free spirit that survives on the work that's done by the community around it. While there's no denying the massive amounts of work done by developers of the language, there's also another group that is doing their part to help the language flourish - commercial entities. Scott MacVicar takes a look at a few of them in this new post to his blog.

I thought I'd start with a quick thank you to all those groups and entities involved indirectly with PHP. The PHP project relies on donations to provide our service infrastructure, this is in the form of hardware and hosting from both individual companies and hosting companies to provide collocation.

Besides the hardware support there's also companies willing to allow their employees time to work on the project (such as Pierre from Microsoft). Other companies that have made large contributions include IBM's large amount of testing, Sun's work to improve PHP on Solaris and, of course, Zend's support of the project and the time its employees spend developing the language.