In a recent post on their own site, thePHP.cc has shared some of their own perspectives about the recent future of Zend announcement. For those that aren't aware, the company that acquired Zend several years ago - Rogue Wave - announced their decision to discontinue their support of the Zend Framework project.

Last week, Zeev Suraski, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Enrico Zimuel and Dmitry Stogov, all well-known members of the international PHP community, announced that they will leave Zend, which has been part of Rogue Wave since 2015.

The stated reason is Rogue Wave's strategic decision to focus on the development of Zend Server. If you read between the lines, this implies that Rogue Wave is not going to continue or support the development of the Zend Engine (the core of PHP responsible for compiling and executing code), their IDE Zend Studio, and Zend Framework.

Of course, it is perfectly valid to make money off an Open Source project. This, however, implies at least a moral obligation to give back to said project. Rogue Wave, it seems, will now terminate the symbiotic relationship between PHP and Zend.

The author (Stefan Priebsch) talks about "lip service" not being enough when a company wants to make money from customers but aren't willing to help with the development of the underlying software. He also mentions several other Zend-related products that have a bit more quietly gotten the axe over the years since the acquisition. He wonders about the "downsizing" this could cause in the PHP community given ZF's impact and how, despite this being a large setback for the project, he sees its future as promising given the people involved and the projects around it.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney, (former) lead developer on the Zend Framework and Expressive projects, has a new post to his site looking at the future of the Zend Framework and how priorities have shifted.

For the past thirteen years, I've been either consuming Zend Framework or directly contributing to it. Since 2009, I've operated as project lead, and, since then, shepherded the version 2 and 3 releases, added Apigility to the ZF ecosystem, and helped bring middleware paradigms to the mainstream by assisting with the creation of Stratigility and coordination of the Expressiveproject.

[...] In the last three years, I have performed this work under the umbrella of Rogue Wave Software, who acquired Zend in 2015. However, Rogue Wave has recently made a strategic decision to focus its efforts on the Zend Server product of the Zend portfolio.

He also points out that the team largely responsible for the framework and building it over the years (himself, Enrico Zimuel, Zeev Suraski and Dmitry Stogo) will be leaving Rogue Wave and looking for other employment. Don't worry Zend Framework fans - they're going to do everything they can to keep the framework and its ecosystem alive! They're already looking for other sponsors (corporate or otherwise) so let Matthew know if you might be able to help!

The Zend Developer Zone has announce their "Coffee Cup of Service" winner for the month of June 2017: Sara Golemon.

It is time for the June 2017 PHP Community (coffee) Cup of Service award. This month it goes to someone who has been giving to PHP for more than 15 years, Ms. Sara Golemon.

Sara is a regular speaker at PHP conferences worldwide, an active core contributor, [and] one of the release managers of PHP 7.2.

Please join us here at Rogue Wave in saying thank you to Sara for her more than fifteen years of service to PHP and the PHP community.

This is the second winner of the "Coffee Cup of Service" winner with the first being Michelangelo van Dam himself who the award was inspired by.

Zend has posted a new press release about their acquisition by Rogue Wave Software, a company specializing in tools and services "making it easy to write, test, and run complex code."

Rogue Wave Software announced today that it has acquired Zend Technologies, the leader in end-to-end PHP web and mobile application development and deployment solutions. With 50 percent of the web workload running on PHP, including Magento, Drupal, and WordPress, Zend products drive PHP in the enterprise, from code creation through production deployment.

[...] “Today’s announcement expands Rogue Wave into PHP web and mobile application development, underscoring our goal to make developers heroes by accelerating their ability to create great code,” said Brian Pierce, CEO of Rogue Wave.

It's something that's definitely taken the PHP community by surprise and left many wondering what the future of the language my hold with Zend having been such a critical part of the engine that parses and executes the PHP code we write every day. Chris Tankersly has already shared some of his thoughts on the matter and why, as he puts it, this "doesn't matter" to PHP and it's community as much as some are thinking.