The PHP Foundation is a good thing.

Things wrong

Blog: The main PHP developer is no longer involved in the maintenance due to the pressure of life, and the PHP Foundation is set up quickly

On November 23, 2021, Nikita Popov, the lead PHP developer, announced in a post that he would no longer be involved in major maintenance of PHP. Nikita Popov is said to have been working on PHP since he was in high school, in 2011, and has contributed a lot to PHP over the past 10 years.

One of the reasons behind this decision was that Nikita Popov, one of the main contributors, decided to shift his focus from PHP to LLVM. Nikita Popov started working on PHP in 2011 and has been working on PHP at JetBrains for nearly three years, making major contributions to three major releases there — PHP 7.4, PHP 8.0, and PHP 8.1.

Nikita Popov didn’t say why he left, but it seems to be due to the pressures of life, as everyone knows that maintaining OPEN source PHP projects doesn’t pay.

As a result, however, The PHP community has announced The formation of The PHP Foundation, detailed in The New Life of PHP — The PHP Foundation. The foundation is looking for maintenance staff who can maintain PHP on an ongoing basis to keep it healthy.

In fact, the PHP Foundation was discussed for a long time, but somehow failed to move forward, and Nikita Popov’s departure precipitated the almost forgotten agenda. In order to be able to find a successor as soon as possible, also is not to let tragedy continue to happen, the foundation is now in opencollective.com/phpfoundati… Sponsor.

Personal ideas

These two days in the community “PHP foundation” things have been flooded.

• Announced the creation of the PHP Foundation
• The main PHP developer was no longer involved in the maintenance due to the pressure of life, and the PHP Foundation was established at an accelerated pace

Regardless of whether Nikita’s reasons for leaving are true or not, PHP project developers deserve some financial reward. Open source is not easy. After ten years of development work, I saw too many excellent projects and finally abandoned maintenance because of the embarrassment in real life. Dreams are good, life is cruel.

PHP, as open source software, is not currently owned by any commercial organization and is run as a public welfare project. In the long run, there are still many disadvantages. The biggest drawback is the lack of stable developers.

So the PHP Foundation is a great thing.

A small request

LearnKu has the largest PHP forum (# 1 Google search) and Laravel forum (# 1 Google search) in the country. As the LearnKu.com webmaster, I feel it is my mission to promote this issue. On the other hand, as a PHP practitioner, I have been indebted to PHP for many years, and have been somewhat dependent on PHP to support my family, and have always been grateful to PHP developers.

Here I have a small request, hope to see this information friends, spread this matter out.

Let more people know, and most importantly, let more companies and businesses that benefit from PHP know. After all, individual donations are limited and mostly one-time donations, while long-term and stable donations by commercial organizations (through monthly donation channels) are a long-term solution: