According to this post on the Utah PHP User Group's website today, there's been talk of adding JSON support to the Core portion of the PHP distributions.

There has been some recent activity on the PHP Developer mailing list about the addition of JSON into the PHP Core. After reading the thread, I did a little research on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Here is a great website to read more about it.

You can check out the discussion over on the archived copy of the php-dev mailing list...