PeterReg Developer is reporting that Zend (a company who offer many commercial services based around PHP) are going to work with Microsoft to improve support for PHP on Windows Server.
Zend are planning to build professional-grade builds of the PHP software specially designed and optimised for Windows Server, both the 2003 release Microsoft have out now and the upcoming Longhorn Server (as yet no final name) which will arrive after Windows Vista.
What's interesting about this is that Zend and Microsoft are working together to make PHP work on the Windows platform - Microsoft are building an interface to their web server IIS, while Zend will optimise and package a version of PHP specially for this kind of deployment.
While a lot of people might call this bad news for FOSS and the community, I actually think it's good. Yes, there are two sides to this - one is that it strengthens Windows Server as a platform, but the other is that it opens PHP, free software, up to a wider audience (although it's not clear at this stage whether Zend Core, the optimised version of PHP, will be open or not). Also, this proves that Microsoft are either wanting to, or are being forced to recognise the importance of having support for PHP as a server-side technology. My guess is that considering PHP's popularity, Microsoft feel that Windows Server is missing out to Linux+Apache on the web server front because PHP is more difficult to install and configure on IIS.
In other PHP-on-Windows news, Microsoft have opened a PHP-on-IIS forum, which hopefully confirms their commitment to PHP on the Windows web server platform.
