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Timothy Fisher over at Java Developer's Journal has an interesting post about all of the cool open source apps today being written in PHP. Of course, this flame war has been raging for some time (e.g. here is just one example), and it recently heated up when IBM and Oracle announced greater PHP support. I think Fisher's comments are meant to be inspirational in nature, sort of a "hey, Java buddies, wake up and get a move on," but it does beg the question whether this has anything to do with PHP per se, or whether it has something to do with the nature of people who turn to Java. I would proffer that people turning to Java are professional programmers, for the most part working in larger organizations where corporate mandates dictate they use one of the two major vendor-supported platforms, .NET/COM or Java/J2EE. I could get in trouble for this statement, but professional developers who are in IT primarily for the money are probably not the ones seeding the ranks of the open source community. I will not fall into the trap of attempting to stereotype open source developers as consisting solely of hackers and non-professional types, as many others seem to do, but it is a different breed and ethic than that which is fostered in the non-IT industry, professional programmer community. Thus, if my theory is correct, it might be tough to get Java open source apps to parity with PHP apps. And, lest we forget, Richard Stallman's rants against Java as not being true to open source principles do not help.