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PHP Foundation 'under-funded' with one full-time staff member, director says (www.reuters.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [B] to c/hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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[–] 1 point 2 weeks ago

Governments should be funding the foundation.

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    79 comments in c/technology@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 70 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    Its not just PHP, or even just software and digital infrastructure. Most average people would be appalled to get a look behind the curtain of how a great many things they depend on every day are operated once it is not sexy anymore and just fades into the background of the machinery that keeps the lights on and their lives going.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 weeks ago

    Many industries are this way, people don't seem to realize it's only in some cases two or three people in an entire region that are keeping some key peice of equipment going. Like shit even our infrastructure is that now, we used to have people on site everywhere monitoring but now so much is just a guy in an office doing the work of 50 people.

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    • [–] 55 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    Why didn't we have a meme with these wobbly piles of blocks representing the internet structure having one tiny pillar identified as PHP yet ?

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    • [–] 19 points 2 weeks ago

    It is called personal homepage so it makes sense there is only one person.

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    [–] 33 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

    Is the director the only staff member? Does he want a raise?

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  • [–] 121 points 2 weeks ago* (6 children)

    “We have one full-time staff member (that's me) and 14 mostly ​part-time contractors,” Executive Director Elizabeth Barron of the PHP Foundation said via ⁠email in an interview on Friday. Board members are unpaid volunteers, and funding ​comes from donations and grants.

    Sounds more like she is stretched thin, and pointing out how unsustainable the current model is. Only one person dedicated to maintaining a programming language that ~70% of the internet uses is the perfect example of that xkcd “all modern infrastructure, vs one obscure person who has thanklessly been maintaining a project since 1997” meme.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    Yes I understand, I should have added a /s to that comment. I even have a version of that cartoon above my desk.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    Why would you add the /s? We got so much more info from a misunderstanding!

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  • [–] -4 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    70% of the internet? No. The web? Yes, maybe. These are not the same thing.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    The usage of PHP in enterprise appliances is actually pretty wild - many firewalls, load balancers etc are using PHP for management plane activities. There is a lot out there outside of userland, and those are the appliances most vulnerable in my opinion. A compromised firewall is worse than a compromised website.

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    • [–] 11 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

    who in the hell writes in notepad?

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  • [–] 28 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    I have a few PHP scripts that I maintain. I use Notepad++ like a normal person, though.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    one who programs in PHP, apparently, but not all PHP programmers use notepad , some use nano and others ed. /jk

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    • [–] -1 points 2 weeks ago

    Just let it die

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    [–] -1 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    So a company with 1 developer has a director, interesting.

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    • [+] -15 points 2 weeks ago (16 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 24 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

    because it didn't support the same features and ended up being a fork of the language called hack.

    since it wasnt a replacement and would have required lot of software to be modified or in some cases like wordpress and drupal largely rewritten it never saw wide adoption.

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  • [+] -26 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 7 points 2 weeks ago

    the foundation didn't exist so that one staff member didn't exist. the foundation doesn't direct development either, they sponsor development and otherwise help to fund the project.

    there is not fault either. hhvm was never a php project. they happened in parallel and there was a lot of good feelings at the time and efforts to collaborate. facebook ended up releasing hack lang and the projects drifted apart.

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  • [–] 67 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    Because it’s Facebook

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    Not sure why the php foundation didn’t look at frankenphp and said yes this will be the software for php9

    NIH i guess

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  • [–] 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    i think this comment misunderstands what frankenphp and the foundation are.

    • its supports php because it is php. its built on top by loading it as a library. it doesnt implement the language so is not and does not want to be a replacement.
    • the foundation doesn't choose where the language goes. They support development in various ways but language design goes through an rfc process influenced by lots of people.
    • frankenphp does come up in devel mailing list discussions. i think its largely thought it being an external project is a stregth but also closely part of the project.
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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago

    Because it wasn't php proper, it was an interpreter for PHP and Hack (their own language), and since 2019 they cut off PHP anyway

    Also it's mostly because the vast majority of those "70% of websites" that use PHP are wordpress installs, and wordpress never switched to the HHVM.

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    • [+] -37 points 2 weeks ago (23 children)

    Yk what isn’t understaffed? Other, better languages.

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  • [–] 42 points 2 weeks ago (13 children)

    There might be “better” languages, but PHP is still used by ~70% of the web.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

    That number is a bit questionable:

    • It only includes sites where the server-side language can be detected. That's often easy with PHP because of URLs ending in .php and well-known software like Wordpress which identifies itself in ways that are easy for a crawler to detect.
    • It counts sites, not traffic. There are a lot of Wordpress sites out there which get three visitors a month.
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  • [–] 18 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    and well-known software like Wordpress

    Sorry, but you're using the fact that PHP is used by the framework that makes up about 40% of the web on its own as an argument against the claim that PHP might be on as much as 70% of all websites? That's before you start getting into other platforms like Drupal and MediaWiki, or more general-purpose frameworks like Laravel.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 weeks ago

    It only includes sites where the server-side language can be detected. That's often easy with PHP because of URLs ending in .php and well-known software like Wordpress which identifies itself in ways that are easy for a crawler to detect.

    So there are possibly more PHP sites out there than we realize, because the ones which disguise their URLs are ambiguous

    It counts sites, not traffic. There are a lot of Wordpress sites out there which get three visitors a month.

    You shouldn’t be as concerned with popularity, and much more concerned with attack surface. Your argument certainly can’t be that there are thousands of idle servers out there that should no longer be maintained because no one reads the blog hosted on them?

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  • [+] -6 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    So what. It's like saying hunger is good because most people are hungry.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    They, notably, did not say that PHP was good.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    I’m aware of that. I’m questioning it still being used.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago

    Are you actually though? Because if you were actually wondering this, it wouldn't take a genius to figure out that you can very easily stop wondering by googling something along the lines of "what websites were downed on account of the recent php vulnerability". But you clearly haven't. So why the fuck are you even in this conversation?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    You're right. Also, spoken language is much better than written language, let's get rid of written language as well.

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    • [+] -30 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (5 children)

    Maybe the 'director' should be helping then?

    Oh, OK. That's much better 😁

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  • [–] 37 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    The director is the full time dev... Read the article.

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  • [+] -25 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    Thanks for clarifying, but I'm not going to go into Reuters, or any of those ad-ridden sites, like ever.

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