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PHP founder takes flight from Yahoo!

MS deal 'as lame as I feared'

Updated PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf has left Yahoo!

Lerdorf announced his departure via the popular Web2.0rhea service Twitter. "Feels a bit odd to be unemployed. Probably crazy to leave the best job I have ever had," he wrote, "but after 7+ years it was time for something new."

Twitter is also where Lerdorf voiced his opinion of Yahoo!'s search pact with Microsoft back in July. "As lame as I feared," he said. "Time to find a new job."

Yahoo! told The Reg Lerdorf had resigned to pursue "other opportunities.' And Lerdorf told us: "There is no juicy story here. I was there for over 7 years. It is a great place to work, and like I said, I am probably crazy for leaving. It was just time to try something different."

Lerdorf is the second big name open source developer to leave Yahoo! in the wake of the Microsoft deal, which will see Redmond run Yahoo!'s search engine. On September 1, Hadoop founder Doug Cutting left Yahoo! for the Hadoop startup Cloudera.

When he first announced his departure, Cutting said it had nothing to do with the Microhoo! pact. "This has been in the works for awhile and is unrelated," he told the New York Times. "I am definitely not leaving in any sort of protest, and the thing I like least about this move is that it might be perceived that way."

But when Microsoft takes over Yahoo! search, that will be the end of the the Yahoo! Search Webmap, the indexing system the company once billed as the world's largest Hadoop application. Inspired by Google research papers describing Mountain View’s proprietary software infrastructure, Hadoop is a means of crunching epic amounts of data across a network of distributed machines.

Lerdorf created PHP in 1995 and authored the first two versions of the open source web programming language, before it was commercialized by Zend. He has been at Yahoo! since 2002. ®

Update: This article has been updated to include comment from Yahoo! and Lerdorf

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