If Automattic funded the PHP Foundation with 8% of their revenue [1], like what Matt Mullenweg asked from companies using WordPress [2], the PHP Foundation would have lots of money.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
It only bothers me when they try to claim their new license is open source or use misleading language when it isn't. Which seems to be what 90% companies doing that do.
People can do whatever they want with their intellectual property as long as they aren't lying about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Sure if you ignore the many governments around the world that use PHP, the (still) most popular blogging software (which also has several ecommerce solutions bolted on top), wikis. The list goes on.
A pet peeve of mine is when people offer simple solutions that are only simple by virtue of ignoring all use cases that don't matter to the author.
Every interconnected system of concerns has simple solutions when you reduce it down and ignore the ordered effects.
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.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g6qi8i/automatt...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/automattic-planned-to-targ...
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.
It overwhelmingly seems like the language of the cheap and not very technical or providers of services to the cheap and not very technical.
They recently posted about how to patch their software from the command-line (https://www.netgate.com/blog/critical-php-security-update)
Wikipedia
Wordpress
Hrmmm.
Also, not a company but Wikimedia Foundation definitely has some funds too.
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.
And asking harder? How does harder look like in comparison to regular asking?
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.
I suspect this is also the case for PHP though.
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.
Also it gets less fun when people start making demands of you and you have to deal with taxes and all the unfun stuff.
It only bothers me when they try to claim their new license is open source or use misleading language when it isn't. Which seems to be what 90% companies doing that do.
People can do whatever they want with their intellectual property as long as they aren't lying about it.
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.
[0]https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep...
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
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.
Security improved one blockbuster vuln at a time.
Closed source might have more money but they almost never invest it in security.
A pet peeve of mine is when people offer simple solutions that are only simple by virtue of ignoring all use cases that don't matter to the author.
Every interconnected system of concerns has simple solutions when you reduce it down and ignore the ordered effects.
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.