Birth of the PHP Foundation
I’ll confess, I don’t follow the development of the PHP language closely…not even at a safe distance. I’m subscribed to Roman Pronskiy’s PHP Annotated newsletter and I check out Brent Roose’s blog and tweets about new and changing features. I don’t design languages and rarely have a strong opinion about language features. I take what’s given and use it to solve the problem before me. So when I saw JetBrain’s announcement of the formation of the PHP Foundation, I was curious.
PHP has always been driven by the community. There is open debate on feature requests and a democratic process in place to vote on new features for the language. It’s not a perfect process but then nothing would be perfect in everyone’s eyes. But it is functional and, most importantly, fully transparent to all involved. So in this respect, I didn’t think there was a pressing need for a foundation.
In the announcement was the nugget that did speak to a need that a more formalized, governing organization could provide: a paycheck for developers. Remember, open source promises access to source code but not a living wage. A lot of folks get paid by companies to work on open source projects if it benefits the company. By way of example, JetBrains employed Nikita Popov because he worked on PHP, which JetBrains sells an IDE for. By ensuring continued development of PHP, JetBrains keeps a customer base.
Nikita Popov, a core PHP developer, was hired years ago by JetBrains specifically to work on PHP, and now he has departed to focus on other interests. These types of events can be quite challenging in open source projects because if no one steps up to fill the hole, the gap can grow as the work must now be shouldered by the remaining people.
For many open source projects, the code is developed because the developer(s) love doing it. There is no paycheck, no support contracts, sometimes little acknowledgment of the effort. This is the nature of the beast. The PHP Foundation’s promise. “…to fund part/full-time developers to work on the PHP core,” takes a significant step to help ensure that the core developers who work on PHP aren’t doing so out of charity. Writing code because you enjoy it is one thing, getting a paid to do it is even better.
Change can be tricky, even challenging. The PHP Foundation can be a great thing — I’m cautiously optimistic about what they can help accomplish. To that end, I signed up as a recurring backer. If you code in PHP, please consider becoming a financial contributor. Head on over to the PHP Foundation on Open Collective and signing up with a recurring contribution.
