I am going to take a break from the NuSOAP server finish up, and that will come soon. Instead, the update to PHP 5.2.14 has come out. What is really odd about this news, is that according to the release of the news, it also

“marks the end of the active support for PHP 5.2. Following this release the PHP 5.2 series will receive no further active bug maintenance. Security fixes for PHP 5.2 might be published on a case by cases basis. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3.”

There are a lot of different applications that are just now adopting 5.2, and it will not be actively supported.

Marco Tabini posted a really great article on this, and I highly suggest to review this. It is located at his blog: blog.tabini.ca. While Marco makes great points in his article, the comments on the article are also a good thing to read.

One idea that is important to remember, is that 5.3 will (in theory) work even if the code was made for 5.2. This is of course, the code is well written. But that is the case no matter what code or library, or base you may use. That is the most important aspect, write good code. However, by not providing support when a possible major group of users come on board, can be risky. However, this is where the whole argument of open source and paid services can come back to play in political office meeting rooms.

Paid services, like Microsoft’s .NET libraries for example, are expensive, but are still supported. Sure it is expensive. Think of this in an enterprise application environment. A company has invested a lot of man hours on a major project upgrade (from 4 to 5.2 for whatever reason they had to stay at 4 for the time), and then find out that the major project they undertook to move to 5.2 will now need further evaluation to determine if 5.3 is acceptable to the company. More cost of investing time, energy, resources, and money can be a huge thing when the “powers that be” decide if they want to continue to use open source for their applications.

I know this is a very simplistic example, and there are even more questions with this, like if it was an enterprise app why did it stay on php4 for so long. But since 5.3 has been out for a little over a year, it seems shocking that they would be so quickly retiring active support for this.

It may have more to do with other things, including shelving PHP6. I am not as worried about 5.2 retiring. But it is an interesting event. Some will say this is really nothing, and that there is really nothing to this. And they may be entirely correct.