The C language, which displaced Java as the most popular language in the Tiobe Programming Community monthly assessment in April, has maintained its number 1 spot in the May report released this week. But a high-profile member of the PHP community is questioning the accuracy of the index itself.

The PHP Group has released PHP 5.4.3 and PHP 5.3.13 on Tuesday in order to address two remote code execution vulnerabilities, one of which is being actively exploited by hackers.

The PHP Group plans to release new versions of the PHP processor on Tuesday in order to patch two publicly known critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, one of which was improperly addressed in a May 3 update.

While many popular website applications (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.) are open source and therefore freely available, running these PHP-based apps on a Windows IIS web server requires a bit of retrofitting.

The news is now old that investors will be given a chance to trade big piles of cash for a piece of the pile of code known as Facebook.com. Just a short time ago, few of us would have predicted that a pile of PHP would be worth billions of dollars, but clearly we underestimated the power of the platform.

The Horde open source messaging and groupware project is gearing up for the first major release of its application suite and development environment in years with version 4 due in mid-2010.

People all over the world spend a total of eight billion minutes a day on Facebook. Some 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared every week, 400 billion Web pages are viewed every month and the site logs a staggering 25TB of data every day. David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook, talks about how the social networking giant uses open source tools to achieve its massive app scalablilty.