Even though Microsoft and IBM dont compete directly that much, the bad blood seems to run deep between them. Is it possible theyre still pissed off at each other over OS/2? Hard to believe. Or maybe its the beef over Open Document Format? For whatever reasons, you dont often find them lined up on the same side on an issue. So I was surprised to see the two as founding members of an open source initiative launched by Zend Technologies, the company behind the popular PHP software programming language, to encourage the use of PHP in cloud computing.
The initiative, called Simple API for Cloud Application Services, is like Java was supposed to be in the early days of the Internet: If a corporation or independent software company writes an application with PHP to run in a cloud computing environment, theyll be able to use application programming interfaces and adapters that make it possible to easily move the application to another cloud service provider. Since PHP is the programming language for more than one third of todays Internet applications, this is a big deal.
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