Why is the PHP Foundation a good thing?

                                                                                                               

The whole story

The following paragraph comes from a PHP/Laravel community post: PHP’s main developers no longer participate in maintenance due to life pressure, and the PHP Foundation is accelerated

On November 23, 2021, Nikita Popov, the main developer of PHP, announced that she would no longer participate in the main maintenance of PHP and would gradually fade out from the end of the month. It is said that Nikita Popov has been involved in the development of PHP since he was still in high school, in 2011. It has been 10 years now. He has contributed a lot to PHP, but it can be said that he has missed it.

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

Although Nikita Popov did not clearly state the reason for leaving, it can be understood from relevant information that this should be due to pressure in life, because everyone knows that there is no income from maintaining PHP open source projects.

However, the PHP community announced the establishment of the PHP Foundation. For details, see The New Life of PHP – The PHP Foundation. The foundation is looking for maintainers who can continue to maintain PHP so that it can develop healthily.

In fact, the PHP Foundation has been discussed for a long time, but for some reason it failed to move forward. The departure of Nikita Popov prompted the hasty implementation of this almost forgotten agenda. In order to find a successor as soon as possible and to prevent tragedies from happening again, the foundation has launched sponsorship at opencollective.com/phpfoundation.

Personal Thoughts

In the past two days, the "PHP Foundation" has been all over the community.

• Announcement of the establishment of the PHP Foundation
• The main developers of PHP will no longer participate in maintenance due to the pressure of life, and the establishment of the PHP Foundation will be accelerated

Regardless of the reason for Nikita's departure True or false, PHP project developers should have some financial rewards. Open source is not easy. After ten years of development work, I have seen too many excellent projects give up maintenance in the end, all because of the embarrassment in real life. Dreams are beautiful, but life is cruel.

As an open source software, PHP is currently not 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 that there will be no stable developers.

So the "PHP Foundation" is a good thing.