The title (and some of the contents) is actually quite misleading as this whole incident has nothing to do with Zend, Microsoft or the relationship between the two companies.

php.net is not run by Zend, it’s a community effort (with contributions from Zend but also from countless others). Specifically, Zenders haven’t been involved in the Windows build part of PHP for quite some time – at least ever since the MSVC 6 build stopped being the way to build PHP (I developed that one).

You might say that Microsoft wouldn’t let the PHP project know how to build on Windows, but even that would be inaccurate. The PHP on Windows build system wasn’t built by Microsoft, but by Wez Furlong of PHP fame.

I guess it all stems from bjori@php.net‘s comment referring you to ‘the Microsoft guys’ – he probably meant the people in the PHP project that care about Windows, and not Microsoft employees per se.

For the record, Zend builds PHP on Windows (as does php.net) on a regular basis.