The Zend Developer Zone has a review posted of a report that the O'Reilly Radar group put out concerning Open Source software and its place in the Enterprise business today.

It's not often that a report generates this much excitement but "Open Source in the Enterprise" says a lot of what needs to be said to C-Levels considering making the jump to Open Source.

Cal mentions one of the 6 factors that are driving more and more businesses to open source software (like PHP) - the community that surrounds them (how vibrant is it?). He also points out the concept of "vendor lock-in" and how open source can help companies accomplish it by ridding themselves of proprietary software. The report can be gotten from the O'Reilly Radar group for $399 for an individual copy or $995 for a sitewide license.

Sandro Groganz has pointed out a new article in the latest issue of the German publication PHP Magazin about marketing open source PHP software titled "Auf die offene Art".

Good source doesn't always speak for itself because the better product does not always establish itself without help. Why is that? This article gives some answers as to how a PHP-based product can be presented well in the market with the right marketing and community as a PHP based product well in the market can be placed through appropriate marketing and communication palatable to potential customers.

You can get your copy of this latest issue (German only) from the PHP Magazin website (with a cover story looking at the DojoX framework).

On the Ibuildings blog today Mikko Koppanen talks a bit about Open Source software projects and things that can help to make them successful.

An idea can be a tool or a library that you need and think others might find useful; a new technology innovation; or something you think you could implement better than the existing tools. Extra care has to be taken if you decide to create a new tool to replace an old one. In most cases, these projects end up reinventing the wheel without any added value. A wheel is wheel, right?

He recommends a team infrastructure growth as the application grows and the importance of documentation and maintenance after the project has been launched.

On the PHP::Impact blog, Federico has written up a bit of a "history of PHP applications" since 1998 that have changed the community (and the online world) by being released.

From managing databases to shopping, writing blogs to sending emails. Ten years of passion, great software architectures, team work and revolutionary ideas. Here are the most influential open-source PHP applications to date.

Among those on the list are things like SquirrelMail (1999), phpBB (2000), Drupal (2001) and WordPress (2003). More lately things like frameworks and content management systems have been popular and are being developed with more structure and better standards than some of their predecessors.

In a new post on his blog, Guy Harpaz answers a few questions people have been having about the debugger protocol that the PHP IDE project uses.

Debugging a PHP application or a PHP web server requires connectivity between an IDE and a Debugger engine (a PHP module which is installed on the web server). The debug protocol defines this connection. [...] When the Eclipse Foundation approved the PHP IDE project, Zend Studio's debug protocol was opened source and was chosen to be the debug protocol of the PHP IDE project.

He goes through why they made the choice, touches a bit on the security aspect of the two debugging protocols he mentioned (DBGp and Zend Studio's) as well as their common methods for output.

David Coallier has issued a challenge to all PHP developers in Ireland and in Europe to "stand up" and offer to share their knowledge with others in the local communities:

Now is the time to prove that we are all friends and Open Source Passionate after all. This is something I have been pondering on meeting all technological groups together instead of being divided, but I believe this push from Laura is exactly what Ireland needed in order to make it's outstanding Technological IQ even higher than it already is.

He's talking specifically about one opportunity - the Ireland Open Source Technology Conference 2008 happening in May, 2008.

On his blog today, Stefan Mischook has posted his take on some of the killer PHP projects that are out there:

Part of PHP's power is actually found in the variety of open source (free to use) PHP based applications. I'm talking about things like blogs, web frameworks, forums, CMS' etc. I was just thinking, that a list of 'killer' PHP open source projects would be useful

There four on his list so far - WordPress, the Zend Framework, Drupal and Punbb.

To be totally honest about it, we've seen much of the good stuff coming out of the PHP world, in the last few years. PHP developers are leap-frogging ahead with regards to their level of skill and the quality of code they produce.

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.

After moving on from Mindquarry, Sandro Groganz has decided to start up a new venture to help out the Open Source community - an Open Source Marketing Consultancy.

Due to solid demand, I will officially start my own business offering marketing consulting services to Open Source software creators and contributors in February. Clients will be able to choose from a broad range of marketing services, including strategic as well as operational tasks and social media as well as traditional marketing.

He will be offering services to help Open Source projects become more visible and profitable including creating marketing strategies, branding, positioning, public relations, collaterals and working with social media. He's also providing some of the basics behind it all in entries to the wiki on his site.

Packt Publishing has announced this year's winners for the CMS awards with categories such as "most promising", "best PHP CMS" and the "best open source social networking CMS".

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. Following on from the success of 2006, Packt has expanded the Award for 2007 with an increase in prize money and the addition of new categories.

The top three on the Overall Open Source CMS category were (in rank descending) - Drupal, Joomla! and CMS Made Simple. Check out their feature article for more details on Drupal's win.