“The new life of PHP”

A newly established foundation will take care of the future needs of the PHP language. While the current RFC process will not change for the time being and decisions will continue to be made by the PHP internal community, the Foundation will seek to recruit developers to work on the language on a full-time and part-time basis.

The PHP language will have its own foundation. A non-profit association consisting of several companies and individuals has the task of ensuring the quality and future of PHP. To this end, it has begun collecting donations via the Open Collective platform. JetBrains alone has already pledged a contribution of 100,000 USD per year. In addition to the Czech software giant, many other well-known donors are on the list of supporters, including PHP inventor Rasmus Lerdorf and Taylor Ottwell, initiator of Laravel. The names of the companies involved in the foundation are therefore unsurprisingly completed – besides JetBrains – by Laravel, Symfony, Zend, Private Packagist, Craft CMS, Automattic, Acquia, Tideway, and Prestashop.

SEE ALSO: “A large, worldwide fan base that wants to help others and defends PHP”

One of the motives for the establishment of a foundation is cited by those involved as being the personnel of Nikita Popov, who has been one of the main contributors to PHP for a long time and will now turn to new tasks. The new foundation’s self-imposed goal is to provide funds to reward developers for their work on PHP. This should ensure that the language continues to be developed and has a secure future.

According to Romand Pronskiy, Product Marketing Manager at JetBrains, plans for a possible foundation had already been in the works since May 2021. Even though the idea did not arise for the first time in the PHP community, it had been floating around since then and finally became more and more concrete with the announced departure of Nikita Popov. On Monday evening, JetBrains, Laravel and the Foundation itself officially announced the foundation.

According to the initiators, the next steps are the search for the necessary donations and the application phase. The application phase has already started and aims to find PHP core developers. Interested parties are called upon to contact the PHP Foundation directly using a form provided. Furthermore, the elaboration and documentation of the workflows is mentioned as one of the next tasks, in which the community should also be involved. Meanwhile, the RFC process is not to be changed, nor is the work of the PHP internals, who make decisions about the language itself by vote. Initially, the focus seems to be clearly concentrated on the problem that there are too few core developers for PHP. This is where the newly founded organisation comes in and it will be exciting to see how both the Foundation and PHP develop as a language.

All information about the PHP Foundation can be found on the JetBrains blog, Laravel, and the corresponding Open Collective page.

The post “The new life of PHP” appeared first on JAXenter.