The PHP language developer community has established a new non-profit organization, PHP Foundation, which will be responsible for organizing project funding, community support, and ensuring the development process. With the help of the PHP Foundation, the goal is to attract interested companies and individual participants for joint funding of PHP work.
A priority for 2022 is the intention to employ full-time or part-time developers who will work on the core components of the PHP interpreter in the php-src repository. The possibility of allocating separate target grants is also being considered. The creation of the new organization will not affect the charter of the PHP Internals community, which will continue to make decisions related to the development of the PHP language.
One of the reasons for establishing the organization was the departure of Nikita Popov from JetBrains, which funded his work on PHP (Nikita was one of the key developers for PHP versions 7.4, 8.0, and 8.1). On December 1, Nikita will move to another company and will pay less attention to PHP due to changing interests â his main activities at the new job will be related to the LLVM project. To avoid dependency of the PHP project on individual key developers and their employment in commercial companies, it was decided to create an independent organization, PHP Foundation.
Currently, the organization has already received $19,000 from individual participants, but companies such as Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Private Packagist, Symfony, Craft CMS, Tideways, PrestaShop, and JetBrains have already expressed their intention to join the organization as sponsors. It is expected that these companies will collectively provide an annual budget of $300,000 (for example, JetBrains promised to allocate $100,000 annually).
Source: opennet.ru
