Well I fear it is not that simple. As avid readers of my blog may have noticed I have some beef with the Zend PHP IDE proposal that was recently accepted by the Eclipse Foundation. After studying the Eclipse Foundation governance rules, looking at the facts and talking to people from Zend, I am reminded once again that it is important that people realize that open source is not about licenses.

Open source is not a marketing toy.

Well I am not the only one wondering about how open the PHP eclipse proposal by Zend is. Some people seem to be getting desperate for information (the guy actually asked this question several times - oddly enough the eclipse news web interface does not list all posts). Others are reacting with sarcasm. Zend however seems to simply put these questions on their ignore filter.

Like I said yesterday I downloaded the IDE and played with it a bit. Note that its quite a hefty download if you go with the "all-in-one" package (so pick your mirror wisely!). But I kinda like software that you just unzip and go.

I was very happy to hear when Zend announced that they would join the Eclipse Foundation to facilitate the development of a core infrastructure for an open source PHP IDE. I have used Zend Studio to get around some of the limitations of my primary development environment Weaverslave. So I have high hopes for this open source effort. I just finished downloading and installing the preview though its too early to really comment on the experience.