@ViejoViajero The hard thing there is that it’s not an official part of the project, and it’s too difficult right now from a legal and cultural perspective to make it official.
@derickr@ramsey@ViejoViajero That's a lousy way to make such decisions but the only way that Internals recognizes, so I'd support it. Even if it's just an RFC "hey, can we link/promote them on the home page?" with no more official-dom than that. A passing RFC would resolve any culture issues.
And a failing one would highlight that PHP is doomed.
I’m still a little hurt by it because they launched it at the same time as I was trying to launch PHP Community Foundation, and it blindsided me because I didn’t know they were working on it. So, I’m not the best person to work on such an RFC.
@ramsey@Crell Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm fairly happy it's mostly EU based administrated. Or at least that's a feeling, with so many other foundations being (mostly) weighted towards the US.
The PHP CC people had also been planning a similar organisation for the best part of a decade. But sometimes it just falls into place due to external factors, such as Nikita leaving Jetbrains.
@cdevroe@thephpf I don’t have any insight into that, honestly. I know the short-term goal is to fund several full-time developers. Right now, I think 5-6 developers are funded part-time through the foundation. I’m sure with more money, there will be many more projects and opportunities.
@ramsey@thephpf maybe we could ask those that are already giving, like Automattic, Slack, etc. to give a little more. And, maybe @craignewmark (who may already give as well, I don’t know) could increase their comittment.
@cdevroe@thephpf@craignewmark Automattic are already one of the largest (financial) supporters of the foundation. We need more companies like them to give. 😁
Slack doesn’t use PHP anymore, so I wouldn’t expect them to give, but it’d be super-awesome if they did.
@cdevroe@thephpf@craignewmark Nah. Long before the Salesforce acquisition, Slack transitioned to HHVM and Hack, which was easy at the time because HHVM could run PHP, but now, HHVM no longer supports PHP, so Slack’s backend just runs on Hack.
@cdevroe AFAIK, the other really big engineering companies that switched to HHVM (Wikimedia and Etsy) have switched back to PHP, so Facebook and Slack are the only major users of HHVM and Hack.
@ramsey It's a very embarrassing story, but for many Japanese people, language is something that "falls from heaven.'"
Perhaps this has a lot to do with the language barrier, and Japanese people may feel that information in English is something that happened in some distant world.
If the current situation of lack of funds and resources could be disclosed in Japanese (even unofficially), it might feel more familiar to Japanese people.
@ramsey Of course, there are pages that can be viewed in Japanese, but in many cases, the path to getting there is in English, which may be why people end up leaving the site.
@Girgias@saki@ramsey Every year I call on other companies to donate through our company blog. Several companies have expressed their support for this and have donated, so there could be some good in calling for donations from the beneficiary's side. This may be due to the local preference for stories like returning a favour, but I believe it is also a reasonable response from a purely business PoV, as the stability and development of the language has real benefits for the companies use it.
@sji@saki@ramsey Agreed, I have tried and go talk to companies at conference I speak at, and even if the people staffing the booth do seem in favour and say they will bring this up with management, it never really seem to lead to something more concrete sadly :-/
@ramsey I don't even know if there is an official way for making a donation "to php itself" and not to a php-based project such as Symfony or similar. Is the above/below link to opencollective correct?
@ramsey interesting, are there any paid maintainers at all?
The Python situation was pretty similar, until a few years ago there were hardly any paid maintainers at all. Now there are a bunch, and that's lead to a whole slew of improvements recently. But compared to the heavyweights like the Java and Javascript VMs the funding situation is still ridiculously bad, compared to how widespread the language is.
@cfbolz There are a few paid maintainers, now, but this is a recent development over the last 2 years. They work only part-time on a contract basis.
I know the PSF has had revenue since 2001 and has had yearly revenue over $1M since 2012. What was that money used for before they began paying maintainers a few years ago?
@ramsey then in 2021 they got funding specifically for employing developer in residence, and the dev in residence headcount of the psf is now up to two, soon three.
but by now there are also a couple of cpy core devs that are working on cpython as part of their day jobs. the "faster python" team at MS is five people now, I think? plus some others like this at other companies.
@cfbolz The PHP Foundation was set up 2 years ago to fund core development. This is the first time in the entire history of the language that a group is directly funding development of the language.
There have been a few over the years who have been paid by their companies to work on it; Yahoo and Zend come to mind, as companies who have done this.
@cfbolz Then, of course, for a time, Facebook was helping, but they essentially forked PHP to create a derivative language (Hack), and the engine Hack runs on (HHVM) no longer supports PHP. AFAIK, only Facebook and Slack still use Hack and HHVM.
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