Microsoft collaborates with open source software developer Zend

World’s largest software company Microsoft has entered a long-term partnership with Zend which supplies tools for developing open source applications.

Bill Hilf, a Microsoft technical strategist said in a statement that this deal would ensure that PHP programs run on past and future versions of Microsoft Web server software.

Impressively, this deal would involve support on both Windows Server 2003 and the upcoming version, code-named Longhorn.

Andi Gutmans, Zend’s co-founder and chief technology officer said in a statement on this new development: “PHP has always worked on Windows. The problem is that it never performed very well.”

The two companies would now work together to ensure that it would be easier to run PHP on Windows computers. These improvements would be made available to PHP’s active base of contributors for further enhancement.