PHP Foundation 'under-funded' with one full-time staff member, director says

pmlnr

xkcd 2347 again, what a surprise. Oh, wait, there's at least one paid person, that should be something /s

Hamuko

The solution is obvious: pour trillions of dollars into Anthropic and OpenAI, and security will trickle down.

bwoebi

The actual work expenses of the PHP foundation can be viewed here: https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation/transactions?search... and https://opencollective.com/php-foundation-eur/transactions?s... (seems like "work" selects most of that) And it's not cheap to pay that many people, especially not full time (which is partly why they don't have more full-time contractors). According to https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation#category-BUDGET they only have a balance $350k currently, sinking. It'd be really awesome, if more companies would sponsor the PHP foundation (especially with thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year. A lot of small contributions is nice, but not enough.). The work of a few core maintainers is really crucial to the continued development of PHP.

sam_lowry_

She says the full-time member is herself, and looking at her Linkedin (in/elizabethn) she isn't exactly the person who would patch PHP for the two CVEs.

smashers1114

Presumably it makes sense to sunset PHP especially with how cheap code migrations are nowadays.

lwansbrough

Just hold a public yes/no vote on changing licensing to something paid, and charge $10 to vote no.

dingdingdang

Come on Facebook/Zuckerberg, set them up with a structured fund that is invested in s&p500 or something equivalent/better and allows them to pay a handful of devs and a person to admin them (all surplus can be earmarked to go to charity to avoid the sinkhole of bureaucracy from a larger org). Would set the PHP Foundation up for life and the whole world would be better off as a result, smallish directed investment with huge payout from a value perspective.

grokys

And then people complain about "bait and switch " or "pulling the rug" when an OSS project becomes successful and tries to fund itself in some way. "But that should be free" shouts everyone. I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that OSS was the biggest swindle the corporations managed to pull off.

abroszka33

Not surprising at all. There are no incentives for anyone to contribute. And why would there be in this financial system?

rcleveng

Agreed the budgets doens't seem like a lot, I wonder if in addition to some companies that make a lot of money using PHP funding a little, there are some opportunities to use grants or free services for nonprofits? I noticed bills for both Workspace and GitHub (admittedly small amounts for Workspace, less small for GitHub) https://www.google.com/nonprofits/eligibility/ https://github.com/solutions/industry/nonprofits

matteoraso

This has long been an issue with open source projects.[0] If it were up to me, the government (any government) would fund every important project out there. It would be very cheap, and the payoff will be enormous. [0] https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep...

ValentineC

If Automattic funded the PHP Foundation with 8% of their revenue [1], like what Matt Mullenweg asked from companies using WordPress [2], the PHP Foundation would have lots of money. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g6qi8i/automatt... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/automattic-planned-to-targ...

comment0r

If Zig, which is much smaller than PHP, can attract a lot of money (relatively speaking, for its size): what is the PHP Foundation doing differently?

kyriakos

If governments had to take down websites waiting for the patches this week then there are important users of php out there who have the money and should be contributing. I think php needs better public relations and people who can knock on the right doors to get funding.