GoPHP5

[eluser]Derek Jones[/eluser]
Don't forget that not only PHP, but also the vendors that provide server software to hosts have to decide to support or stop supporting a particular version before any ripples are made. As of last month, penetration for PHP5 was still floating around 15%. While it's popular among developers, end users do not care which version is being used, and certainly wouldn't like their choice of location for running an application being limited for political reasons that don't concern them. So, we have to think about these people too: the end users you might be writing a CodeIgniter based application for. I don't see PHP4 going away anytime soon, and I don't see the PHP Dev team as realistically being able to force that hand so quickly. MySQL hasn't been supporting version 3 for over a year, and we still encounter host after host running 3.23.x. - 10% or more.

Industries can influence one another, sure, but one industry (development) trying to force another (hosting) into a business decision rarely works out well for either party. They (the hosts) will tell their users in a heartbeat to choose other software that doesn't restrict what servers they can run on.