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Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2022 04:50:49 +0000
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To: Victor Bolshov <crocodile2u@gmail.com>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP Community to support Ukraine and help to stop
 Russian agression
From: george.banyard@gmail.com ("G. P. B.")

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On Wed, 2 Mar 2022 at 09:31, Victor Bolshov <crocodile2u@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello internals.
>
> In these dark days for humanity, we as people of civilization, people
> of sanity, kind and caring people with children and families - we have
> to speak up, loud and clear, in support for Ukraine. To stop Russian
> aggression.
>
> I suggest to add Ukranian flag and a supportive anti-war disclaimer to
> the header of php.net website.
>
> Why is this important? There are a lot of PHP developers in Russia. A
> lot of them, sadly, have been brainwashed by Putin's propaganda. They
> still must have a lot of respect to PHP authors and creators. Seeing
> that these people, who have their respect, are against the war and for
> the freedom of Ukraine, might have an impact.
>
> This is not the time to "stay away from politics", we are experiencing
> an attack on humanity itself. Take example from
> <https://junit.org/junit5/> and their clear statement.
>
> Say NO to war!
>

There is no one who can make such a call on whether or not to make a
statement on behalf of PHP.
PHP is not owned by anyone, we don't even have a steering committee
compared to other languages who *might* be able to make such a call.
PHP's development is extremely distributed, for better or for worse.

This is in stark contrast to a project like Symfony (a product "owned" by
SensioLabs) who can make such a call.
Even other projects which have a more distinct leadership haven't said
anything, so I don't see how a project which has no clear leadership can do
so.

On the fact: "not saying anything is also taking a stance", I think nobody
here disagrees with this, but that's not the issue.
The issue is: who gets to decide when and what and how PHP says something
about a matter unrelated to PHP.
There *might* be a tenuous argument to be made that the PHP Group which
allegedly holds the copyright to PHP should be the ones to decide this.
However, I don't think most of us would want to go down that route.

The only way PHP decides on anything is via the RFC process, and although
it has been used for process/policy related discussion (e.g. voting RFC,
naming of PHP 6/7)
I personally don't think it is the best medium to make such decisions, but
introducing any other process would need to be discussed and voted via the
current RFC mechanism.

Moreover, at the time of writing this, none of the following programming
languages have any messages in regards to the war:
- Python (https://www.python.org/)
- TypeScript (https://www.typescriptlang.org/)
- Rust (https://www.rust-lang.org/)
- Ruby (https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/)
- C# (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/)
- Scala (https://www.scala-lang.org/)
- Kotlin (https://kotlinlang.org/) [which is developed by JetBrains who
*have* taken an open stance against the war]
- Golang (https://go.dev/)
- ECMAScript/JavaScrip (
https://www.ecma-international.org/technical-committees/tc39/)
- Julia (https://julialang.org/)
- R (https://www.r-project.org/)
- C and C++ (https://www.iso.org)
- Perl (https://www.perl.org/)
- Raku (https://raku.org/)

Obviously this list is not exhaustive (and if there is one which has
messaging do let me know),
but as other - popular - programing languages (some having something more
akin to "leaders") haven't added any messaging against the conflit,
it makes me extremely wary about PHP doing it first when we don't have the
maintainers bandwidth to deal with whatever might come after such a
decision.

Kindly,

George P. Banyard

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