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PHP Foundation 'under-funded' with one full-time staff member, director says

79 points firesteelrain 1 hour ago 30 comments

pmlnr 1 hour ago | parent

xkcd 2347 again, what a surprise. Oh, wait, there's at least one paid person, that should be something /s

Hamuko 1 hour ago | parent

The solution is obvious: pour trillions of dollars into Anthropic and OpenAI, and security will trickle down.

bwoebi 1 hour ago | parent

The actual work expenses of the PHP foundation can be viewed here:

https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation/transactions?search... and https://opencollective.com/php-foundation-eur/transactions?s...

(seems like "work" selects most of that)

And it's not cheap to pay that many people, especially not full time (which is partly why they don't have more full-time contractors). According to https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation#category-BUDGET they only have a balance $350k currently, sinking.

It'd be really awesome, if more companies would sponsor the PHP foundation (especially with thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year. A lot of small contributions is nice, but not enough.). The work of a few core maintainers is really crucial to the continued development of PHP.

gchamonlive 51 minutes ago | parent

There are countless applications out there still running on PHP, but if the community interest can't raise the required resources to maintain the tool, maybe it's time for it to die, or at least downgrade into maintenance mode so in time it'll become a legacy language.

londons_explore 24 minutes ago | parent

If they asked harder for donations, they would surely raise enough for maintenance.

Plenty of companies can donate 0.1 engineers to work on php, if for no other reason than to make php better for their own use cases.

sam_lowry_ 1 hour ago | parent

She says the full-time member is herself, and looking at her Linkedin (in/elizabethn) she isn't exactly the person who would patch PHP for the two CVEs.

londons_explore 24 minutes ago | parent

Presumably that's why there are also lots of part time contractors.

smashers1114 1 hour ago | parent

Presumably it makes sense to sunset PHP especially with how cheap code migrations are nowadays.

glimshe 1 hour ago | parent

How cheap are code migrations nowadays? Vibe-migrations, you mean?

whatthejesus 1 hour ago | parent

Sounds like you’ve been snorting too much iron oxide.

jmull 1 hour ago | parent

What's easier, maintaining PHP or migrating/breaking every single PHP-based site?

And who's to say whatever sites are migrated to won't be "sunsetted" in a few decades too?

Seems like a no-brainer to maintain it.

smashers1114 8 minutes ago | parent

Of course it has to be maintained. Things are maintained as they are sunset.

anonymous908213 1 hour ago | parent

Beating the dead horse, as you are: the Bun Rust migration cost millions of dollars in tokens and took an additional 3.5 months of labor after the widely-marketed "11-day rewrite" before being shipped as a release, and in the process introduced hundreds of new issues.

milofeynman 6 minutes ago | parent

What about the typescript rust port https://blog.cloudflare.com/typescript-rust-port ?

thinkindie 48 minutes ago | parent

migrating to what? just take a look at the newest CVEs, https://www.tenable.com/cve/newest , and you will see that no technology is spared by high or critical reports.

rbanffy 15 minutes ago | parent

I agree a lot of PHP applications can be ported to other tools, but that only covers that much. Just look at banks and COBOL code.

lwansbrough 1 hour ago | parent

Just hold a public yes/no vote on changing licensing to something paid, and charge $10 to vote no.

IshKebab 50 minutes ago | parent

I imagine that would go down well and result in zero forks...

lwansbrough 36 minutes ago | parent

Awesome dude let the scabs work for free lol

YetAnotherNick 26 minutes ago | parent

So you think those forks will solve underfunding problem?

dingdingdang 1 hour ago | parent

Come on Facebook/Zuckerberg, set them up with a structured fund that is invested in s&p500 or something equivalent/better and allows them to pay a handful of devs and a person to admin them (all surplus can be earmarked to go to charity to avoid the sinkhole of bureaucracy from a larger org). Would set the PHP Foundation up for life and the whole world would be better off as a result, smallish directed investment with huge payout from a value perspective.

grokys 51 minutes ago | parent

And then people complain about "bait and switch " or "pulling the rug" when an OSS project becomes successful and tries to fund itself in some way. "But that should be free" shouts everyone. I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that OSS was the biggest swindle the corporations managed to pull off.

anonymous908213 39 minutes ago | parent

I've been shouting this from the rooftops for ages now. OSS is a trojan horse, something meant to devalue the work of independent developers/small businesses and ensure that the only way the software can be supported is through the patronage of big tech, who earn the money to control such OSS through their unethical monopolistic practices. Look at the languages with funding, and where it comes from. C and C++ (both LLVM and GCC), C#, JS/TS, Java, Rust, Go, Python are all directly funded by big tech. The naive idealism results in everything falling into the hands of ~10 corporations plus some VCs who gamble on which ones will become worth acquiring by big tech, and then we wonder why everything goes to shit and our entire ecosystem is so user-hostile.

grokys 26 minutes ago | parent

And the indoctrination is so strong that even after all I've lived through and seen, my default is still "let's open source this".

acoustics 27 minutes ago | parent

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't mind at all when an open source project switches licenses or whatever. They gave away the fruit of their labor, but I am not entitled to any more of it.

What does bother me is when the projects pivot to claiming that users now have a moral obligation to financially support the project. There is a kind of dishonesty in this move.

It's not that a successful project "should be free", it's that its success depended on it being free. If they had said all along that they'd eventually ask users to pay, that would be honest... but then they wouldn't have seen much of that adoption in the first place.

grokys 24 minutes ago | parent

In my case, I never intended on my open source project becoming popular, it just did and I had to either abandon it or make it my job. I'm not sure where that falls in your judgement.

I suspect this is also the case for PHP though.

acoustics 16 minutes ago | parent

It's your project, to the extent that you own the copyright. You are free to switch the license on your project, etc. If anyone tries to shame you for this, you should pay no mind. (Edited to add that you are also free to abandon it, and you could do that with a clear conscience.)

Likewise, users are free to continue using open source software without payment or donation, to fork the project, etc. If anyone tries to shame them for this, they should pay no mind.

carlosjobim 32 seconds ago | parent

Why would you have to abandon it instead of just keeping on in your preferred pace? If anybody wants more rapid development they can fork it, not your problem.

abroszka33 39 minutes ago | parent

Not surprising at all. There are no incentives for anyone to contribute. And why would there be in this financial system?

rbanffy 18 minutes ago | parent

> There are no incentives for anyone to contribute

If you like PHP, you might want to contribute. I like tmux, for instance, and I contributed code to them. I did the same for Sysdig, and a couple other projects.