Jani has undoubtedly contributed a lot to the PHP project, but he is _not_ a lead developer on Zend Engine or TSRM. The original Slashdot post makes it sound like this is some sort of death blow for PHP. It is not. As a simple example, Jani has been gone on a UN peace forces duty in Afghanistan for the past 6 months and while his presence was missed (mostly in bugs triage and build system), the project has not lost any steam or anything like that. Consider this:

% grep sniper TSRM/*.[ch]
TSRM/tsrm_nw.c:/* $Id: tsrm_nw.c,v 1.8.2.1 2006/01/01 12:50:00 sniper Exp $ */
TSRM/tsrm_virtual_cwd.h:/* $Id: tsrm_virtual_cwd.h,v 1.48.2.5 2006/04/10 11:56:18 sniper Exp $ */
TSRM/tsrm_win32.c:/* $Id: tsrm_win32.c,v 1.27.2.1 2006/01/01 12:50:00 sniper Exp $ */
TSRM/tsrm_win32.h:/* $Id: tsrm_win32.h,v 1.19.2.1 2006/01/01 12:50:00 sniper Exp $ */
% grep Jani Zend/*.[ch]
% grep sniper Zend/*.[ch]

I am not sure how his profile on zend.com was compiled, but whoever did it should have been more accurate. Let me emphasize this: Jani is a friend and will be missed, but that was his personal decision made for personal reasons (which I will not disclose here) and will not affect the project.

Let's all keep our heads up and speculation down.

-Andrei
http://www.gravitonic.com/