The PHP language developer community has established a new non-profit organization, the PHP Foundation, which will be responsible for arranging funding for the project, supporting the community, and supporting the development process. With the help of the PHP Foundation, it is planned to attract interested companies and individuals to co-finance the work on PHP.
As a priority for 2022, the intention is to employ full-time or part-time developers who will work on the basic components of the PHP interpreter in the php-src repository. The possibility of allocating separate targeted grants is also being considered. The creation of the new organization will not affect the bylaws of the PHP Internals community, which will continue to make decisions related to the development of the PHP language.
One of the reasons for the creation of the organization was the departure of Nikita Popov from JetBrains, which funded his work on PHP (Nikita was one of the key developers of PHP 7.4, PHP 8.0 and PHP 8.1 releases). On December 1, Nikita will move to work in another company and will pay less attention to PHP due to a change in interests - Nikita's main activity at a new job will be related to the work of the LLVM project. To avoid the dependence 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 from individual participants, but companies such as Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Private Packagist, Symfony, Craft CMS, Tideways, PrestaShop and JetBrains have already announced their intention to join the organization as sponsors. It is assumed that together these companies will provide an annual budget of 300 thousand dollars (for example, JetBrains promised to allocate 100 thousand dollars a year).
Source: opennet.ru