PHP Foundation runs on a single full-time employee as its balance sinks to $350K
PHP Foundation 'under-funded' with one full-time staff member, director says
The PHP Foundation, which pays the core maintainers behind PHP's continued development, has just one full-time staff member and a shrinking balance of roughly $350K, according to its director. Public expense records show the cost of paying contributors, and commenters argue that more companies should sponsor the foundation, since a handful of maintainers carries work critical to the language.
It'd be really awesome, if more companies would sponsor the PHP foundation.
- ValentineC
If Automattic funded the PHP Foundation with 8% of their revenue [1], like what Matt Mullenweg asked from companies using WordPress [2], the PHP Foundation would have lots of money.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1g6qi8i/automatt...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/automattic-planned-to-targ...
- bwoebi
The actual work expenses of the PHP foundation can be viewed here:
https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation/transactions?search... and https://opencollective.com/php-foundation-eur/transactions?s...
(seems like "work" selects most of that)
And it's not cheap to pay that many people, especially not full time (which is partly why they don't have more full-time contractors). According to https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation#category-BUDGET they only have a balance $350k currently, sinking.
It'd be really awesome, if more companies would sponsor the PHP foundation (especially with thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year. A lot of small contributions is nice, but not enough.). The work of a few core maintainers is really crucial to the continued development of PHP.
- grokys
And then people complain about "bait and switch " or "pulling the rug" when an OSS project becomes successful and tries to fund itself in some way. "But that should be free" shouts everyone. I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that OSS was the biggest swindle the corporations managed to pull off.
- matteoraso
This has long been an issue with open source projects.[0] If it were up to me, the government (any government) would fund every important project out there. It would be very cheap, and the payoff will be enormous.
[0]https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep...
- sam_lowry_
She says the full-time member is herself, and looking at her Linkedin (in/elizabethn) she isn't exactly the person who would patch PHP for the two CVEs.