PHP Foundation 'under-funded' with one full-time staff member, director says(www.reuters.com)
98 pointsby firesteelrain4 hours ago12 comments
  • bwoebi3 hours ago
    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.

    • MattGaiseran hour ago
      Are there many serious companies using PHP?

      It overwhelmingly seems like the language of the cheap and not very technical or providers of services to the cheap and not very technical.

      • justinator16 minutes ago
        It's used on Pornhub so it's both very useful and very important but excuse me princess if it's not on the next Mars lander robot.
      • jerfan hour ago
        It is used all over the place in ways you don't even realize. "not very technical or providers of services to the cheap and not very technical" is a particular corner of the market that is visible and full of PHP, sure, but you don't see the huge masses of PHP code running that doesn't expose a .php on the end of the URL.
      • BadBadJellyBeanan hour ago
        Wordpress and Nextcloud are two very prominent pieces of software that come to mind that are built on PHP. I'm sure there is more out there.
        • swat53512 minutes ago
          I suppose my question would be: what would be the reason to choose PHP in 2026 for a greenfield project over the plethora of other available languages?
      • wingmanjd40 minutes ago
        Netgate (behind pfSense) use PHP for their firewall administration interface.

        They recently posted about how to patch their software from the command-line (https://www.netgate.com/blog/critical-php-security-update)

      • 4ndrewlan hour ago
        It's mainly used by profitable and/or public sector orgs, so unlikely to have much intersection with the HN crowd.
      • cyanydeez19 minutes ago
        Isn't there some large php based software run by a bruised ego who can't even get his own house in order, let alone help fund his largesse, but complains about his leeches.

        Hrmmm.

      • Hamukoan hour ago
        Is Facebook still using it?

        Also, not a company but Wikimedia Foundation definitely has some funds too.

        • pkayean hour ago
          I think Facebook switched to their own language Hack a decade ago.
        • damontalan hour ago
          Didn’t they roll their own version of it?
    • gchamonlive3 hours ago
      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_explore2 hours ago
        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.

        • gchamonlivean hour ago
          The mythical engineer-hour, has this ever worked? Maybe for an already stabilished dev team...

          And asking harder? How does harder look like in comparison to regular asking?

  • grokys3 hours ago
    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.
    • acoustics2 hours ago
      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.

      • grokys2 hours ago
        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.

        • acoustics2 hours ago
          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.

        • carlosjobim2 hours ago
          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.
          • niccean hour ago
            Some people also have tried the paid new feature prioritization where it later lands for everyone. I think it worked in some projects but project must have been really good otherwise.
          • grokysan hour ago
            I mean: who doesn't want to work full time on their passion project? Especially when I'd just been made redundant, I feel most people would do the same.
    • anonymous9082132 hours ago
      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.
      • cedillaan hour ago
        I'm not saying that big tech isn't hijacking open source software, but that does not mean that free or OSS was always "meant to devalue" devs or small companies.

        Until very recently, big tech pumped untold millions of dollars into obliterating FLOSS altogether, calling it a cancer that will destroy any enterprise it touches.

        • anonymous908213an hour ago
          You mean just Microsoft. Microsoft was an outlier. Even in the 90s, Linux and GCC were being funded by big tech. Obviously they were developed with the best of intentions, but I think it's accurate to say that OSS is "meant" to devalue developers because the purpose of a system is what it does, and that is what it does in practice.
          • engineerDave25 minutes ago
            Or Oracle, Adobe, … it’s more than just Microsoft.
      • eikenberryan hour ago
        This is why Free Software is important. It is about a lot more than just being open source.
      • grokys2 hours ago
        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".
  • matteoraso12 minutes ago
    This has long been an issue with open source projects.[0] If it were up to me, the government (any government) would fund every important project out there. It would be very cheap, and the payoff will be enormous.

    [0]https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep...

  • rclevengan hour ago
    Agreed the budgets doens't seem like a lot, I wonder if in addition to some companies that make a lot of money using PHP funding a little, there are some opportunities to use grants or free services for nonprofits?

    I noticed bills for both Workspace and GitHub (admittedly small amounts for Workspace, less small for GitHub)

    https://www.google.com/nonprofits/eligibility/

    https://github.com/solutions/industry/nonprofits

  • sam_lowry_3 hours ago
    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_explore2 hours ago
      Presumably that's why there are also lots of part time contractors.
  • lwansbrough3 hours ago
    Just hold a public yes/no vote on changing licensing to something paid, and charge $10 to vote no.
    • IshKebab2 hours ago
      I imagine that would go down well and result in zero forks...
      • YetAnotherNick2 hours ago
        So you think those forks will solve underfunding problem?
      • lwansbrough2 hours ago
        Awesome dude let the scabs work for free lol
  • dingdingdang3 hours ago
    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.
  • abroszka332 hours ago
    Not surprising at all. There are no incentives for anyone to contribute. And why would there be in this financial system?
    • rbanffy2 hours ago
      > 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.

      • abroszka33an hour ago
        I like a lot of things as well, yet I don't feel I can contribute after work. I already spend 8 to 10 hours at work. I can't find the motivation to do more.
    • abc42an hour ago
      There are lots of drives besides greed.
      • abroszka33an hour ago
        Of course there are. But do they matter in our current system?
  • Hamuko3 hours ago
    The solution is obvious: pour trillions of dollars into Anthropic and OpenAI, and security will trickle down.
    • markvdban hour ago
      First trickle down economics, now trickle down security!
  • aaron69511 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • pmlnr3 hours ago
    xkcd 2347 again, what a surprise. Oh, wait, there's at least one paid person, that should be something /s
  • smashers11143 hours ago
    Presumably it makes sense to sunset PHP especially with how cheap code migrations are nowadays.
    • anonymous9082133 hours ago
      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.
    • jmull3 hours ago
      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.

      • smashers11142 hours ago
        Of course it has to be maintained. Things are maintained as they are sunset.
        • jmullan hour ago
          If maintenance continues indefinitely, then all good, (but then I wouldn’t use the term sunset).
    • glimshe3 hours ago
      How cheap are code migrations nowadays? Vibe-migrations, you mean?
    • whatthejesus3 hours ago
      Sounds like you’ve been snorting too much iron oxide.
    • rbanffy2 hours ago
      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.
    • thinkindie2 hours ago
      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.