At the end of November, prominent members of the PHP community formed a new PHP Foundation as a non-profit organization, “to ensure the long life and prosperity of the PHP language.” The founding members include Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Craft CMS, Private Packagist, Tideways, PrestaShop, Symfony, and JetBrains—a group of companies with products that rely heavily on PHP.
In just 11 days, the Foundation has has secured an estimated annual budget of more than $280,000 through donations and monthly commitments using Open Collective’s transparent funding platform.
JetBrains, leading the charge with a promise to contribute $100,000 annually, announced the formation of the foundation. It stated that the organization will not seek to influence PHP language decisions but will leave those to the PHP Internals community. The donations will be used to fund developers to work on PHP:
Our initial scope of operations is narrow so as to maximize the chances of successfully addressing our immediate concern – that there are not enough core developers working on PHP.
In our first year or two, our only priority will be the hiring of core developers. Eventually, after our immediate concern has been resolved, the Foundation will be prepared to expand the scope of operations to include the hiring of developers dedicated to non-core projects. Beyond that, we may expand our focus to include community-oriented projects.
The New Life of PHP – The PHP Foundation
The loss of a longtime prolific contributor Nikita Popov, who is moving on to work on LLVM with significantly less time on PHP, was one of the major contributing factors for the formation of the foundation.
“Losing one of the main contributors to PHP is a blow to the community, because he is the bearer of a lot of knowledge and expertise,” PhpStorm marketing manager Roman Pronskiy said. “It puts the language