NYCPHP Meetup

[David Sklar]

> I think PHP might be penetrating the enterprise much like Linux did
> originally.

Exactly. I think PHP is doing what Linux did but with a 4 or 5 year lag.

In 1998 I was at a conference of newspaper (online and offline) publishers.
On a panel about open source I made the (I thought then) optimistic
prediction that Oracle would release a Linux port of their database software
in a few years. Most people there thought I was, to put it politely, way too
optimistic. Oracle released a Linux port six or nine months later. Both I
and my detractors were wrong.

I don't know if there's an analogous PHP event like the Linux Oracle port
(Yahoo! using PHP maybe) but PHP is still sort of in the stage that Linux
was back then -- all of the technically savvy people are aware of it, it
does a fabulous job at a certain well-defined set of tasks, it needs way
better marketing and corporate backing, and there are crucial "enterprise"
(ugh, I hate that word but it's handy shorthand) features that it still
needs.

Whether PHP will follow in Linux's penetration success depends hugely, IMHO,
on the marketing and corporate backing piece (which leads to the
feature-adding piece). When there are more companies, more larger companies,
more well-publicized and well-publicizing companies that provide for PHP
things like systems integration services, round-the-clock support, patent
indemnification, pre-configured hardware and software, first-class
benchmarks, reusable class libraries, application servers, and everything
else that makes Fortune 1000 IT VP's sleep soundly at night, then PHP has a
fighting chance to become more than a "little known scripting language".
Netcraft surveys impress engineers. Magazine covers impress managers. Like
it or not, that's the way the IT world works.

Some of these are technical issues, but most of them are not, and that, I
think, is PHP's biggest weakness. There are a lot of brilliant technologists
hacking away on PHP but there are not very many brilliant marketers or deal
makers. However distasteful that kind of thing is for programmers, it's
absolutely necessary to break out of the geek ghetto and become the kind of
phenomenon that Linux is.

David