The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest community interview today, this time with John Coggeshall, a PHP core developer.

In this episode Cal and John talk about where open source has been, where it's going and why John thinks that might not be the best direction to go. He suggests that the focus has moved away from people being invested in a project for the sake of it and has "lost it's independence". He uses the term "corporate source" to describe what he sees as the current state of open source on the web.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 for listening at your leisure. If you enjoy the episode be sure to subscribe to their feed and get the latest episodes as they're released.

As is pointed out both by Cal Evans and the Zend Developer Zone, there's been another article posted due to the response from the (now infamous) CIO article - "PHP’s Enterprise Strengths and Weaknesses, Take 2" (by Zend's John Coggeshall).

So, in the digital toolbox of the developer, where has PHP been designed to work best? And where is it, perhaps, not the best tool for the job? [...] While other languages can surely be used to solve The Web Problem, in this article I explain why PHP is the premier solution for server-side Web scripting.

John talks about how PHP was written for the web, how it approaches and handles web requests, the security of the language and some of the major software packages that are being used in PHP development today (like the Zend Framework, PHPUnit and PECL extensions).