What shocks me most is the sense of entitlement. They downloaded PHP, its behavior changes and they'd rather complain to those who changed it and annoy them until the thing works for them again than fix the bug in their code. If they are not happy with the free product and the free support, there are other options.
PHP has its shortcomings, but, as in any open source product, if it doesn't work for you, you have a couple options.
Problem is, at that point you have built a lot of business on top of it. So the issue of whether or not it is "free" is moot because it has a very real dollar value to you and also probably to the boss who is breathing down your neck.
Then they have a couple options: fork and keep their own fork, they can pay the PHP community (or someone in it) to change it back (or to provide a backwards-compatibility mechanism) or pay developers to change their software to work with newer versions of PHP.
> they can pay the PHP community (or someone in it) to change it back
The decision was defended on its own merit, so I would be really disappointed if bringing money to the table affected the outcome. Funding open source development is great as long as meritocracy is maintained. That's why Linus never accepted a job at a company that had a stake in pushing Linux in a certain direction.
If they could prove that the change would create a really huge expenditure and would thus damage the community, I assume a workaround could be reached through the normal democratic decision process. I imagine a config option to restore the original functionality would be a nice solution, but I'd suggest the company should fund its development (along with proper tests and associated code).
It's really hard to not blame the creators when SO MANY things in PHP are fucked up. I would wager a good bit of cash that this isn't the only "wtf-moment" this guy's dealing with in terms of his day-to-day PHP adventures, and it was simply the straw that broke the camels back. Couple that with an innate misunderstanding of how open source works and a bit of idiocy, and you got the motivation for this bug report.
PHP has its shortcomings, but, as in any open source product, if it doesn't work for you, you have a couple options.