Yet Wordpress is still the most widely used blog software ever. PHPBB and it's ilk still run the forum game. Wikipedia has yet be unseated.
If it's cost > it's profit, why is it still used so widely?
Network effects, data lock-in, asynchronous information exchange in markets. Just because something is rationally better doesn't mean that the market actors are rational.
That said, companies like EA, Apple, and Amazon license Jive Forums (which is not cheap), Confluence, et al for a reason.
I recently replaced a C#/.NET app with a PHP version and saved a company close to a million a year in licensing, servers, staffing and development costs. Not to mention it took my team a third of the time to develop as the original application, yet performed better and had more functionality. There was a significant gap in LoC as well.
Your anecdote is a personal anecdote, coming from the person most likely to have a particularly jaded view of both the short and long-term costs involved.
We dropped PHPBB and moved to Jive Forums several years ago, as the costs of weekly updates and surprisingly regular break-ins easily outweighed the cost of licensing Jive's software. However, moving away from the forum required data migration, which was difficult and time consuming.
And that's not a personal anecdote? You aren't particularly jaded? I don't understand why I would have a jaded view of the short and long term costs involved. You'll have to explain. I'm not a PHP developer, btw. I consult across a wide variety of technologies and have done so for the last 15+ years. I would have certainly been better paid for that particular gig had I stuck with C#.
It would make sense that Apple and Amazon use Jive since all of their web properties are largely Java based, why step outside of a core competency?
And just to be clear, I would never recommend any PHP forum software (just ask the exasperated folks @ Massify), mostly because I think they are functionally retarded and security is a joke. But that has little to do with PHP than it does with the way they are written.
If it's cost > it's profit, why is it still used so widely?
Network effects, data lock-in, asynchronous information exchange in markets. Just because something is rationally better doesn't mean that the market actors are rational.
That said, companies like EA, Apple, and Amazon license Jive Forums (which is not cheap), Confluence, et al for a reason.
I recently replaced a C#/.NET app with a PHP version and saved a company close to a million a year in licensing, servers, staffing and development costs. Not to mention it took my team a third of the time to develop as the original application, yet performed better and had more functionality. There was a significant gap in LoC as well.
Your anecdote is a personal anecdote, coming from the person most likely to have a particularly jaded view of both the short and long-term costs involved.