Zend Optimizer 3.3.9 for FreeBSD 64bit

[fadolf]

When will you release Zend Optimizer 3.3.9 for FreeBSD 64bit?

[kentatzend]

Zend does not plan any more releases for FreeBSD. We have end of lifed all of our FreeBSD product due to lack of demand.

[fadolf]

there is a 32bit binary version of 3.3.9 on your download site though, what's stopping you to recompile the code on a 64bit machine?
searching for "FreeBSD" on those forums lists 26 different Topics, so there can't hardly be any "lack of demand", or are you trying to xxxx off the FreeBSD community on purpose?
if in doubt, go ask the guys over at php.net why they use freebsd as their server platform...

[it_architect]

Lack of demand?

1. FreeBSD and especially since 6 & 7, have had many converts, even large hosting companies like iXsystems. We ourselves have migrated all of our ?Nix servers to FreeBSD because we get more users per box while maintaining good performance and the reliability has gone up. Netcraft in May 2009 shows FreeBSD holds 3 of the top 5 for reliability. Go back for years and you will see it holds between 3 and 7 of the top 10 every month, which is disproportional to its marketshare.
2. The largest shared hosting companies in the world use FreeBSD exclusively for their shared hosting. both now and in the past, such as New York Internet, Pair networks, Swishmail, iPower, Yahoo! shared hosting, I can go on forever. Netcraft quote: "Over half of the FreeBSD active sites are at the largest 20 hosting providers" Does one even need to ask why they are doing so well or why they chose FreeBSD?

That leaves only two possibilities, neither of which are good.
1. The "Lack of demand" statement is intentionally false.
2. The "Lack of demand" statement is due to incompetence on the part of the person supplying the statement.
3. There is a general lack of demand for Zend.

There is no place else left to go with the "lack of demand" statement.

[peterpm]

Get Zend Optimizer 64bit for FreeBSD6.x.
Install compat6.x....
Run install-tty script of ZendOptimizer(not install.sh) and you are good :-)


/usr/ports/devel/ZendOptimizer

Also does teh job, but I run into other problems there which I solved(see here viewtopic.php?f=57&t=2971)

Peter

[kentatzend]

That leaves only two possibilities, neither of which are good.
1. The "Lack of demand" statement is intentionally false.
2. The "Lack of demand" statement is due to incompetence on the part of the person supplying the statement.
3. There is a general lack of demand for Zend.

First, Zend would never make an "intentionally false" statement.

Second, we do not dispute your statements above about the general popularity of FreeBSD in hosting. But in your own comments you state that the survey you use shows reliability information and even you concede that this exceeds it popularity. In fact we agree with most of what you say.

Third, none of that means Zend is seeing demand for products from that community. We offered commercial products for FreeBSD for several years but we saw almost no sales. Since sales of our commercial product must support the development of our free technologies there just wasn't enough income from FreeBSD to support the R&D, QA and other associated costs. Zend has significant demand for it's paid products on Linux, Windows. Even Mac exceeds FreeBSD in terms of demand by a great margin. So while FreeBSD is popular for a number of purposes that use community may not need or values Zend's offerings.

Fourth, your #2 conclusion is personally offensive. I'm sure you are a nice guy and probably would not make such statement face to face but you really have no justification for calling me incompetent.

Kent Mitchell,
Director of Product Management
Zend

[fadolf]

Hello Kent

it may be true that there aren't many freebsd users among your direct customers, but the point you miss to see that your direct customers might be customers of those beforementioned freebsd users. Zend Optimizer is not a product you sell, but one to make those you sold work on production platforms.
in my book it's pretty much foot-shooting not to support a major production platform for whatever reasons you think you might have.

so far our stance on the incompatibility between ZO 3.3.0 and php 5.2.10 was to stall php updates until the issue would be resolved.
now as it seems this won't happen we will have to drop support for Zend encoded applications as there is nothing that would make us switch to another OS for our servers. we might lose a few customers over this matter and most likely so will you, so there will only be losers apart from ioncube...

Now it is even more disappointing and infuriating since there even is a version 3.3.9 for Freebsd 32bit so you obviously already have most of the work done.

@peterpm: the version you are reffering to is 3.3.0 which we have installed and which is incompatible with php5.2.10+

[alexdupre]

I have to repeat what fadolf said. Clearly nobody (or very few people) develops software using your commercial products on FreeBSD, so you are completely right to not offer ZendGuard and all other products for FreeBSD. But ZendOptimizer is a free product, that allows Windows/Linux/Mac paying users to deploy their application on FreeBSD hosting servers. If they cannot do it, someone will change the hosting server (few) and others will change the encoding application (many). I think maintaining ZendOptimizer for FreeBSD would be a little work that could benefit both you and your customers.

Sincerely,
Alex Dupre (The maintainer of PHP ports for FreeBSD).

[chrcol]

A truly baffling decision.

It takes what 10? 20? 30? minutes to compile up a binary since its evident you already have freebsd compatible code as there is a 32bit binary.

If you think because you may not have many premium freebsd based customers that removing loader support is not a problem then I suggest a rethink. I currently use 5 different commercial php applications that have closed source code, 3 of these have recently changed from zend to ioncube based on recent zend policies. FreeBSD is a major player in the hosting market.

Is the truth perhaps there is some affiliation with linux operating systems?

A developer may not use FreeBSD, but if they have customers who do use FreeBSD and they cannot sell their product because you zend won't support the operating system then they will move to a competitor (ioncube), they cannot tell their customers what operating system to use.

[icarz_zend]

Thanks to fadolf for the tip about switching to ioncube. We have always recommended zend to our customers. Now maybe a time to consider a move. I understand that Zend does need to focus where feel they can make money, but I wonder if these decisions will cost more in the end tan it seems.