12 November 2009, 12:00

PHP creator leaves Yahoo!

PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf
Source: Jud Dagnall Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of the PHP scripting language, has announced, via the Twitter micro-blogging service, that he has left Yahoo!. After more than seven years working at Yahoo! as an engineer, Lerdorf says that he's ready for "something new". According to The Register, Lerdorf may have left Yahoo! in the wake of the company's deal with Microsoft to power the Yahoo! search engine. At the end of July, on the same day that Yahoo! announced the deal with Microsoft, Lerdorf twittered – "As lame as I feared - time to find a new job", foreshadowing his departure from Yahoo!.

After building a collection of C macros for web development, in 1995 Lerdorf developed PHP and authored the first two versions. PHP originally stood for "personal home page", but the scripting language was later renamed to "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" and is now primarily produced by The PHP Group. PHP is licensed under the PHP license, which, because of restrictions on the use of the term PHP, is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL).

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