There are ever so many reasons to love PHP and MySQL. Let us count a few.
Cost
PHP costs you nothing. Zip, zilch, nada, not one red cent. Nothing up front, nothing over the lifetime of the application, nothing when it’s over. Did we mention that the Apache/PHP/MySQL combo runs great on cheap, low-end hardware that you couldn’t even think about for IIS/ASP/SQL Server?
MySQL is a slightly different animal in its licensing terms. Before you groan at the concept of actually using commercial software, consider that although MySQL is open-source licensed for many uses, it is not and has never been primarily community-developed software. MySQL AB is a commercial entity with necessarily commercial interests. Unlike typical open source projects, where developers often have regular full-time (and paying) day jobs in addition to their freely given open source efforts, the MySQL developers derive their primary income from the project. There are still many circumstances in which MySQL can be used for free (basically anything nonredistributive, which covers most PHP-based projects), but if you make money developing solutions that use MySQL, consider buying a license or a support
contract. It’s still infinitely more reasonable than just about any software license you will ever pay for.
For purposes of comparison, Table 1-1 shows some current retail figures for similar products in the United States. All prices quoted are for a single-processor public Web server with the most common matching database and development tool; $0 means a no-cost alternative is a common real-world choice.
Comparative Out-of-Pocket Costs
ASP/SQL ColdFusion
Item Server MX/SQL Server JSP/Oracle PHP/MySQL
Development tool $0–2499 $599 $0–~2000 $0–249
Server $999 $2298 $0–~35,000 $0
RDBMS $4999 $4999 $15,000 $0–220
Open source software: don’t fear the cheaper
But as the bard so pithily observed, we are living in a material world —where we’ve internalized maxims such as, “You get what you pay for,” “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” and “Things that sound too good to be true usually are.” You (or your boss) may, therefore, have some lingering doubts about the quality and viability of no-cost software. It probably doesn’t help that until recently software that didn’t cost money — formerly called freeware , shareware, or free software — was generally thought to fall into one of three categories:
Programs filling small, uncommercial niches
Programs performing grungy, low-level jobs
Programs for people with bizarre socio-political issues
It’s time to update some stereotypes once and for all. We are clearly in the middle of a sea change in the business of software. Much (if not most) major consumer software is distributed without cost today; e-mail clients, Web browsers, games, and even full-service office suites are all being given away as fast as their makers can whip up Web versions or set up
FTP servers. Consumer software is increasingly seen as a loss-leader, the flower that attracts the pollinating honeybee — in other words, a way to sell more server hardware, operating systems, connectivity, advertising, optional widgets, or stock shares. The full retail price of a piece of software, therefore, is no longer a reliable gauge of its quality or the eccentricity-level of its user.
On the server side, open source products have come on even stronger. Not only do they
compete with the best commercial stuff; in many cases there’s a feeling that they far exceed the competition. Don’t take our word for it! Ask IBM, any hardware manufacturer, NASA, Amazon.com, Rockpointe Broadcasting, Ernie Ball Corporation, the Queen of England, or the Mexican school system. If your boss still needs to be convinced, further ammunition is available at www.opensource.org and www.fsf.org.
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