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Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2021 21:35:56 +0000
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To: php-internals_nospam@adviesenzo.nl
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: [RFC] Deprecate dynamic properties
From: Danack@basereality.com (Dan Ackroyd)

Hi Juliette,

On Mon, 15 Nov 2021 at 23:36, <php-internals_nospam@adviesenzo.nl> wrote:
>
> I've been asked to post the link to the Twitter discussion in this
> thread for visibility.
>
> The Twitter thread generated, and is still generating, quite a lot of
> discussion,

I'm not going to quote from the Twitter thread partly as lot of that
discussion isn't that pleasant. To be clear, this change isn't being
proposed to annoy open source maintainers, it's proposed because
people think it will make the language better, to a great enough value
to be worth the BC break.

But also, a lot of that thread is about the experience of being an
open source developer is absolutely terrible due to many factors
including:

* an almost complete refusal of companies to sponsor work.

* people who work for companies that use open source having an
attitude of entitlement to 'gold level support', and will very quickly
start using emotionally manipulative language e.g. "if you cared about
this project you'd work harder on it".

* a lack of new contributors to open source.

I completely understand how all of things are pretty aggravating.

It's particularly galling when a maintainer tries to get some funding,
e.g. by holding back a release targetting a new version of PHP, other
people will undermine that effort by forking the library and doing
just enough to get it working, but not committing to do any future
work.

I'm in the lucky position that because PECL is so hard to use (and
gate-keepered as to who can use it), that I was able to hold off doing
the release of Imagick with PHP 8.0 support until a couple of
companies stepped up with a (greatly appreciated) non-trivial amount
of sponsorship.

What the future holds for open source is unclear to me. And it's not
at all obvious that open source isn't a morally wrong thing to do, as
to a large extent it seems to rely on individuals subsidising for
profit companies.

However I don't think that slowing down the improvements in PHP core
itself is an appropriate response to companies refusing to pay to
support the projects they rely as a business on.

I do recommend anyone who has an open source project to:

* make sure you have github sponsors or other sponsoring services setup.

* ask for payment for work done previously. If you've created a
library that companies are dependent on, it's okay to refuse to work
on it until there is a decent amount of support for that work done.
You don't have to commit to doing new work until the project has a
sustainable rate of sponsorship.

* compare the amount of money you're getting for a project to the
commercial rates for developers, and not to how much cup of coffee is.

* Feel free to forward any cash you don't feel justified keeping to
other opensource projects particularly upstream dependencies or tools.
Or if you don't have enough time to work on that project yourself,
feel free to ask for enough money to pay someone else to work on it.

Once those done, it's perfectly acceptable to put a project on
'strike' until it's funded adequately and refuse to release new
versions to accomodate changes in PHP.

I know that saying 'no' to users is draining as they so often try to
guilt maintainers into doing work for free. If anyone would like me to
help explain to users "your company needs to start sponsoring this
project before this project will acknowledge this issue", in any of
their projects repos, please ping me on twitter
https://twitter.com/MrDanack

cheers
Dan
Ack