PHP and .Net - a third way?

There are certain topics in the world of information technology which always excite intense debate and near-religious fervour. PC versus Mac, open source versus proprietary; whatever stories we push out which may come down on one or other side, you can be sure that feedback from readers will be swift, uncompromising and sometimes abusive.
Now I'm all for debate, I'm up for a lively exchange of views as much as the next man, but sometimes the level of devotion to one or other side is so high it's quite bemusing. Wouldn't it make everyone's life a little easier if we all just got along and put their differences on the back burner?
We've already seen promising moves being made in the content management space to bring together the competing ECM vendors and make their products interoperate with each other. The Content Management Interoperability Services initiative has been hailed by many as a major breakthrough in the industry as it could finally ease the IT headache of having to manage multi-vendor and multi-repository environments. With Microsoft, IBM Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle, SAP and Adobe all on board, it stands a great chance of success. Finally the vendors have realised that the industry can't grow unless greater interoperability is achieved.
And now, at a programming level, a new initiative which could finally reconcile the great divide between PHP and .NET programming languages for the good of everyone - courtesy of WCM vendor Jadu. Development of the Phalanger PHP compiler was funded by the firm, but it is now releasing it into the open source community. It basically enables the creation of PHP applications which can run natively under the .NET Framework, allowing firms to make use of PHP apps without needing to rip out existing .NET/Visual Studio environments.
So PHP developers will finally see the lucrative Microsoft customer base open up to them and, as Ovum analyst Tony Baer told me, it provides "one less reason for .NET development shops to oppose allowing PHP into their wall gardens". It seems web developers can finally have their cake and eat it by profiting from the ease-of-use and effectiveness of the PHP language and the richness of the .NET platform; a benefit which will surely cascade down to end users ultimately in the form of more compelling applications. Good news too for the careers of developers, who will no longer have to go through costly retraining on PHP or .Net if they want to get on in the industry. See, everyone's a winner when look for ways to work together.