⇥ Win a 52″ HD system with php|a’s new contest

From the blatant self-promotion bin: in case you haven’t heard, php|a has a brand new contest running between now and the end of March.

The contest rules are fairly simple (despite all the legal gobbledygook): write the best PHP-on-Windows application (as judged by our panel of experts and the php|a readers) and you will be the winner of a killer grand prize made up of a 52″ LCD HDTV set, a 5.1 surround system and an XBOX Ultimate, plus your very own, all-expenses-paid ticket to TEK·X.

Currently, we have ten people who are hard at work on contest entries. To me, that seems like a paltry number, consider that we have over $10,000 in prizes available and you don’t even need to be running Windows, since we have partnered with Applied Innovations to provide the first sixty participants with their very own dedicated Windows VPS. You know you’re running out of excuses. Try it. Now. Go!

Why PHP on Windows?

As you can see on the php|a website, Microsoft is providing php|a with promotional consideration for the contest—needlessly to say, they have their reasons, which primarily are to make you try and write software in PHP and make it run on Windows. I, however, have a completely different set of motives for running the contest: to make you try and write software in PHP and make it run on Windows.

Where’s the difference? Microsoft wants you try their products because you will hopefully find them useful and adopt them in a setting in which their use will turn into sales. That’s a perfect valid motivation, particularly considering that they (a) are in the business of selling software and (b) they are providing you with a really strong incentive to give their products a try (and without any strings attached!). I, on the other hand, want as many PHP professionals as possible to be aware of what all their choices are.

Every time we discard a choice on the basis of anything other than it not being the right solution for our particular problem, we are doing ourselves and our clients a disservice. It happens a little too often that I come across a client who is suffering through their personal hell because they have discarded commercial alternatives on the basis that they “cost money” or “are not open-source.” In a professional setting, your first goal should be to find the best solution to a particular problem keeping all the appropriate constraints into consideration. If the cost of making OSS work for your specific problem is higher than acquiring a commercial package (a scenario that is not that far fetched if you’re trying to make the open-source software do something it wasn’t meant to), then you’re better off switching—perhaps with the long-term view of helping to sponsor an improvement in the OSS package to make it eventually meet your needs. By the same token, an ill-adapted open-source solution that doesn’t work well isn’t going to further the OSS cause much, either.

Thus, I hope that our little contest will give you an excuse to try out one of the many technologies and software products that Microsoft puts out. You may just find that one or two of them solve your problems in a way that saves you time, or money, or both—and, who knows, you could get a cool TV set and a free trip to one of the best PHP conferences of 2010 in the process!

Photo credit: Windows by eriwst (with some changes by yours truly).