I feel like a spammer for showing up so many places in the past 24 hours and saying “yo, the thing you say no one has built: we’ve built it, it’s right here, we’re paying maintainers every month”.
Tidelift isn’t perfect but it is real and targeting exactly these kinds of problems.
This text is not something we wrote in a rush this morning to meet the moment. We've had variations on this on our site from day 1. I believed it then and I believe it now.
@luis_in_brief So, what happens when you don’t have enough enterprise customers paying to cover software that’s critical to the ecosystem?
I recently received an email from Tidelift saying that you’re reducing the amount you pay to #PHP package maintainers due to lack of demand from your enterprise customers.
@luis_in_brief While I’m upset with the result, I don’t blame Tidelift at all.
I’ve found myself facing the long, steady decline in popularity of PHP. Almost no one is using it in the enterprise these days, which makes it very difficult for senior developers who like using PHP to find jobs paying competitive industry rates, and those of us who maintain the language and popular packages are left questioning whether it’s worth our time and effort to continue.
I’m on the verge of switching to something that could get me a proper competitive salary, or preferably, contracts. The only reason I haven’t is the whole “experience” aspect. Not a lot of people will care about your general knowledge if you don’t have X years of experience in the specific thing 😅
@ramsey yeah, it’s had a weird trajectory. Two of the biggest sites in the world, huge quantity of deployment via Wordpress, and yet… yeah.
I wonder if, Tidelift aside, there’s space for something like a collective of core maintainers, a la Jazzband or Ruby Together (brand RIP), that might be easier to fundraise for from users without a middleman like Tidelift?
@luis_in_brief WordPress went in a decidedly different direction from the language. While the language itself began evolving a more robust object model with a rich type system, WordPress stuck with the procedural, loose typing of earlier PHP, so there’s not a lot of cross-collaboration with their community.
@ramsey and to some extent Meta did too with (name I can’t recall and is ungoogleable), right? And last I looked (admittedly right after we founded Tidelift) Mediawiki was simply trying to use the core language and very little else?
@ramsey Wikimedia briefly ran on (or at least had a pilot program to run on) HHVM, but yeah, I think they had to switch away; I don’t recall the details as it was after my time.
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