Jani "sniper" Taskinen (photo), a long time PHP lead developer, and apparently a Zend employee, has quit the project.

Jani Taskinen Quites

In a cryptic message, he announced that he is leaving the project.

Reasons Are Political

The real reasons are not stated although in this IRC chat, he expressed displeasure with Israeli actions. It should be noted that Jani has served in UN peace keeping missions, including in Lebanon and Afghanistan. One of his comerades has been killed when Israel bombed a UN post.

Zend and PHP

For a bit of a background, Zend Technologies as a company was founded by two Israelis, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans (hence the name Zend), after they rewrote the PHP 3 engine and named it Zend Engine. This continues to power PHP to date. The company has other Israelis serving on its board and executives, some ex-IDF as well.

Conspiracy Theories

The Israeli origin of Zend has caused FUD in the past. I remember receiving an absurd a forwarded email that claims that since Zend is Israeli and they are behind PHP, then everyone should be wary of using PHP as a language, since it has backdoors for spying, ...etc. Of course, the email was written by a pro-Microsoft person, who does not "get it". PHP is open source. One can inspect the code himself, or get someone knowledgable to do so on their behalf.

Here is an excerpt from an email reply that I wrote to someone at the time:

> You know what was the most amazing thing I read some time ago? An
> email message from a tech friend of mine. He works as a Network
> administrator and all his work is Microsoft centric. The email was
> a chain mail. I also saw it posted on some Arabic forums.
>
> The email was saying that the two main developers of PHP are Israelis,
> and therefore no Arab should use this technology because they may have
> planted backdoors for spying, ...etc. or that they will start charging
> money at some point in the future!
>
> Can you image how ridiculous this is? It is OPEN SOURCE for God's
> sake! Go and look at the SOURCE and see if there are backdoors!

Fortunately, this absurdity is not widespread and PHP is in wide use everywhere.

Should Zend Continue?

There has been talk about replacing the Zend Engine altogether for other reasons. Rasmus Lerdorf has expressed support for the Parrot Virtual Machine, although there is no official support for that move yet. There seems to have been an experimental effort for PHP in Parrot by Andrew Knowles called Pint, which is now defunct.

Here is an article with some more details on PHP and Parrot, with some very promising benchmarks. 

Humans are Humans

One would think that politics should not play a part in Open Source projects, given the altruistic nature of it. However, reality is more pragmatic, and people are still people, and the social aspects are the same elsewhere.

Occurances in Other Projects

Geopolitics in Open Source is not new though. I remember a Chinese contributor in the Debian project, Herbert Xu, quitting because of an issue over the Taiwanese flag.

This news item was also discussed on Digg and Slashdot.

The current situation in Lebanon merits its own post.