Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:121864
Feedback-ID: i8414410d:Fastmail
User-Agent: Cyrus-JMAP/3.9.0-alpha0-1234-gac66594aae-fm-20231122.001-gac66594a
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-ID: <8e77ac89-b8dd-4991-b859-943d34592f5d@app.fastmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <e763ad7e-26aa-4f34-9387-6dfa2a3823b6@app.fastmail.com>
References: <e763ad7e-26aa-4f34-9387-6dfa2a3823b6@app.fastmail.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2023 20:40:01 +0000
To: "php internals" <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Adding a donate link to the PHP website
From: larry@garfieldtech.com ("Larry Garfield")

On Wed, Nov 29, 2023, at 6:48 PM, Jim Winstead wrote:
> Hi (again),
>
> A quick re-intro for those who don't know or remember me: I'm one of 
> the original PHP Group members, mostly active during the time of 
> horses, buggies, and the transitions from PHP/FI to PHP 3 and PHP 4. I 
> worked for MySQL through their acquisition by Sun (and then Oracle), 
> and was responsible for a lot of the community/development 
> infrastructure there that grew out of what we had done with PHP 
> (mailing lists, bug tracking, the documentation comment system).
>
> Anyway, one of the ways I've been getting back into the PHP community 
> after a long time away is through people on Mastodon and following the 
> #PHP tag there. Recently someone[1] brought up that there was no link 
> from PHP.net to the PHP Foundation so that people and organizations who 
> wanted to (financially) support PHP would even know where to look. I 
> submitted a PR to the web-php project to add some text and a Donate 
> button to the front page of PHP.net.
>
> Derick suggested that I bring it to internals@ because of the politics 
> involved. And certainly, since I've been out of the loop for a long 
> time, I have to admit ignorance of where those may sit. But from my 
> perspective, it looks like the PHP Foundation is the most sensible 
> place to direct this energy, and worthy of it.
>
> I'd be happy to shepherd an RFC on this. Since almost everyone in the 
> PHP Group seems to have been inactive for a long time, I know there's 
> not really a process in place for this sort of non-technical community 
> discussion and decision making, so the RFC process may be the best way 
> to handle it now.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Jim
>
> [1] https://phpc.social/@ViejoViajero/111381912606384803

Hi Jim.  Welcome back. :-)

The PHP Project today is in a very weird place, strategically.  Officially, it has no leadership, voting is open to over 1000 people, all decisions are made by voting of whichever 20 of those people show up at any given time, and even the servers we have and GitHub access is managed through good will and good luck and good relationships between informally key people.  The legal authority is held by people who no longer have project involvement (like yourself, until today), which somehow hasn't bitten us yet.

(Whether that is a good or sustainable approach is a separate question I won't go into here.)

The project (meaning, the rough consensus of those who post on this list a lot and those with server access) has long tried to avoid "endorsing" any particular PHP user-space project, or company, or organization, or anything else, because of the (valid) fear that the weight of PHP "endorsing" some project would skew market usage.  (The notable exception being Docuwiki, which has been used for RFCs for many years.)  This even extends to stand-alone composer libraries, or composer itself, even when their usage would make the code for the decreasing number of servers we maintain ourselves smaller.

From the project's POV, everyone is a volunteer.  In practice, there's a half-dozen or so people who are paid to work on PHP either part or full time (mostly by the Foundation, but also Zend), but that gives them no *official* special authority.  (De facto, who knows.)

All of that is to say that the de facto consensus has been to run screaming from "endorsing" the Foundation as an organization, which is why Derick likely suggested bringing the topic up here for discussion as it would be a change of cultural direction, not something to be taken lightly.

All of that said...

I think the Foundation has proven itself valuable and beneficial to the project and community, and I for one would absolutely support an RFC to officially recognize the Foundation as a sponsoring organization to which people should give money.  Yes, it's a cultural change, but it's a cultural change that we really do need to make.  We no longer have Zend or JetBrains as an informal sugardaddy; instead, we have the Foundation as a clearing house for smaller sugardaddies (as well as big players like JetBrains and Zend).  And that is a very good thing!  That is the reality on the ground, and we should absolutely recognize and support that.

So count me in as a +1.

--Larry Garfield