The PHP Foundation
The PHP Foundation
At the beginning of 2024, The PHP Foundation is a collective of 9 volunteer board members, 1 full-time operations manager sponsored by JetBrains, and 10 developers paid part-time/full-time who make more than half of the contributions to the PHP language and its extensions.
In 2023, The PHP Foundation received $418,669 in financial contributions from organizations and individuals.
The PHP Foundation’s main focus in 2023 was strengthening the maintenance of PHP core, the project that lives in the php/php-src GitHub repository. This project is the home of the PHP language, where PHP’s interpreter is developed. Everyone who uses PHP benefits in one way or another from the work that is done in this repository.
The PHP Foundation demonstrates its growing impact on the language through an increased volume and velocity of code contributions and reviews. The 6 part-time and full-time developers contracted by The PHP Foundation were responsible for nearly half of the commits and reviews made in the PHP language.
Moreover, the foundation's presence and activities have led to heightened interest and activity in the PHP project overall, with the total number of contributions to the language growing by 79% compared to 2022.
At the end of 2023, the German government’s Sovereign Tech Fund chose to invest in The PHP Foundation’s mission by providing funding for a security audit and other long outstanding projects critical for the PHP ecosystem.
The foundation is expanding its development efforts in 2024 by contracting 4 additional developers and increasing the number of hours that current contracted developers are working.
The foundation plans to spend up to $1,045,000, including compensation and fees. We are looking for additional sponsor contributions to allow us to continue these efforts in the next years.
In 2024, we aim to achieve the following strategic goals:
The PHP Foundation was initiated by JetBrains, Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Private Packagist, Symfony, Craft CMS, and Tideways. It was publicly launched on November 22, 2021.
Since 2021, many companies and individuals have joined the initiative. To make the priorities of the foundation more clear and aligned, we’ve updated the mission statement:
The PHP Foundation’s mission is to ensure the long-term prosperity of the PHP language. The PHP Foundation focuses on providing financial support and guidance to PHP language developers to support its goals of improving the language for its users, providing high-quality maintenance, and improving the PHP language project to retain current contributors and to integrate new contributors. The PHP Foundation aims to promote the public image of the PHP language in the interest of retaining existing and gaining new users and contributors.
So it defines 4 priorities of the foundation:
Many companies with a vested interest in PHP’s prosperity made a major financial contribution during the year. These are the companies that contributed $10,000 or more in 2023:
JetBrains, Automattic, Private Packagist, Craft CMS, Tideways, pixiv Inc., Mercari Inc., Symfony Corp, Aternos GmbH, Sentry, Ardennes-étape, Zend by Perforce, Les-Tilleuls.coop, Cybozu.
Overall, 718 organizations and individuals sponsored the foundation in 2023 on Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors.
Here is what some of the prominent folks say about the foundation.
“We’re proud supporters of the PHP Foundation here at Craft CMS. PHP has played such a huge role in our careers, and it’s an honor to be a part of its story.”
Brandon Kelly,
CEO at Craft CMS
“So much of our world - the content we consume (blogs, ecommerce, social media) - is delivered via PHP applications, enabled by the continuing efforts of the PHP Foundation and the ecosystem it enables. The PHP ecosystem's success has a significant impact on all of our lives, and we at Shopware are therefore proud supporters of the PHP Foundation.”
Ben Marks,
Director Global Market Development at shopware AG
“Les-Tilleuls.coop is proud to support the PHP Foundation. By maintaining the language, the foundation is ensuring the future of PHP and the web. By adding innovative new features, it simplifies knowledge sharing and, in the spirit of free software, makes it easier than ever for everyone to create independent sites and applications.”
Kevin Dunglas,
Les-Tilleuls.coop, FrankenPHP
“As longtime contributors to the PHP project, both financially as well as by employing developers on the project, Zend by Perforce is pleased to sponsor the PHP Foundation and support its mission. Expanding the pool of maintainers and developers capable of evolving the language will help keep PHP relevant, and expand its reach in the web development ecosystem.”
Matthew Weier O'Phinney,
Senior Product Manager, Zend by Perforce
The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructure in the public interest. Its goal is to strengthen the open-source ecosystem sustainably, focusing on security, resilience, technological diversity, and the people behind the code. STF is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) and supported by the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation GmbH (SPRIND).
We have collaborated with STF to create work plans for these specific projects:
The current system for distributing PHP extensions, PECL/PEAR, is outdated and prone to supply-chain attacks, making it unreliable for average developers. This leads to the creation of redundant tools and new security issues.
We proposed to rewrite the PECL installer, replacing the messy pear code and the inefficient website.
Follow the progress of the new tool 🥧PIE here: https://github.com/ThePHPF/pie-design.
Currently, the PHP project's testing framework lacks more specialized support for the automated testing of the FastCGI Process Manager (FPM), especially for issues that require higher load. We propose to develop an FPM/SAPI testing tool that can execute all applications and set expectations on the produced logs and server responses. This tool will be connected with a load testing tool (e.g., wrk) to simulate real-world usage and load.
The work has started in the https://github.com/bukka/wst repository with the plan to move it to the PHP GitHub organization when ready.
PHP, like any other language, has its share of security issues. We are going to collaborate with a security research group for a comprehensive codebase audit and address the discovered issues. This will significantly improve the security of PHP and make it more reliable for developers and businesses.
The audit is being organized in partnership with OSTIF.
The current PHP documentation has several blind spots, with many functions and methods not covered at all. We propose to update and modernize the English PHP documentation, review and remove user comments, integrate 3v4l.org for interactive examples, and simplify the maintenance process. This will make PHP more accessible to new developers and serve as a reliable reference for experienced ones.
In 2023, we renamed the Administration group to the Governing Board to avoid confusions and better align with industry standards.
The lineup of the group has not changed and consists of veteran PHP community leaders, representatives of the founding companies, and other key stakeholders.
One notable change compared to the previous year is a full-time operations manager sponsored by JetBrains in addition to the financial contribution.
We aim to establish a level of involvement for other key stakeholders from the PHP world through the Advisory Board and other initiatives.
To keep major sponsors of PHP abreast of the latest happenings in the foundation and allow them to see the direct impact of their support, we announced the advisory board initiative in March.
In addition to the Governing Board representatives from Automattic, JetBrains, Private Packagist, Symfony, Tideways, and Zend by Perforce, the Advisory Board includes members from Moodle, Shopware, Laravel, Ardennes-étape, Les-Tilleuls.coop / API Platform, Aternos GmbH, PrestaShop, CraftCMS.
Your company can become a member by contributing a minimum of $12,000 to The PHP Foundation as at least a Silver Sponsor.
In 2023, we had a team of 6 developers. All of them demonstrated a high quality of work and dedication to the mission of the foundation. We were happy to renew the contracts for 2024 as well as extend the total number of hours for developers requesting it.
We have also adjusted the compensation rates for developers to better reflect the market, as the rates had not changed since 2021.
We aim to review the rates every year based on the available funding and priorities.
As was mentioned in the previous transparency report, we aimed to extend the team. It did not happen in 2023 because one of the prospective developers could not join the team for personal reasons, and had to step down from PHP core development entirely. Again, this is the Bus Factor at its worst. However, we were able to extend the team starting with 2024.
We accepted applications for developer positions from September through October 2023. We received about 200 resumes, and we’ve chosen 4 developers with a proven track record of contributions to the PHP language and ecosystem.
We offered the new developers 6-month trial contracts so that the developers and the Governing Board can evaluate the results and then decide whether to continue the engagements.
Starting from January, we now contract 10 developers to work on PHP:
We established the following timeline for team review.
And in 2025 we start the cycle again.
In the previous report, we outlined a few organizational and technical goals. Let’s look back and evaluate the results.
On a daily basis, the PHP Foundation staff team contributes to the open-source repositories of the PHP GitHub organization. The foundation team contributes in many forms: filing issues, reviewing pull requests, participating in discussions on mailing lists, triaging issues, submitting RFC proposals.
In this document, four categories of contributions are presented in more detail: commits to php-src, reviews of pull requests on php-src, submitted RFC documents, and documentation work.
The following chart summarizes the number of commits made to the php/php-src repository in 2023.
| 2022 | 2023 | |
|---|---|---|
| Total by The PHP Foundation | 683 | 784 |
| Total other | 885 | 1588 |
Note that the number of commits does not fairly represent the level of effort or the scope of the work. However, it can demonstrate the foundation's relative level of contribution to the PHP core through an objective metric.
The diagram summarizes the number of pull request reviews made in the php/php-src repository from January 1 to December 31, 2023.
| 2022 | 2023 | |
|---|---|---|
| Total by The PHP Foundation | 283 | 702 |
| Total other | 551 | 416 |
Below are the RFC proposals authored or co-authored by The PHP Foundation developers in 2023 (random order).
Jakub Zelenka, one of the foundation developers, also volunteered to be a release manager for PHP 8.3. The PHP Foundation supported such an initiative.
The PHP Foundation represents a community of core PHP developers and advocates for the PHP programming language. The channels listed below were used by the PHP Foundation for public communication:
The PHP Foundation members gave talks at multiple conferences throughout the year:
The PHP Foundation is now officially endorsed on the php.net website. This was the result of a community vote on RFC Promote the PHP Foundation. Big thanks to Jim Winstead and the PHP community for this.
In 2023, The PHP Foundation was financially backed by organizations and individuals with the goal of paying a competitive salary to as many core developers as possible.
| 2021 - 2022 | 2023 | |
|---|---|---|
| Total contributed to The PHP Foundation | $ 712,484 | $ 478,767 |
| Fees * | $ 90,273 | $ 60,098 |
| Total received | $ 622,211 | $ 418,669 |
| Paid to developers | $ 133,285 | $ 275,181 |
* Fees include a 10% Open Source Collective fiscal host fee (dealing with contracts, expense reviews and payments, bank account management, official registrations and dealing with government requirements, open collective platform development etc.), and 1-5% percent of payment processing fees, depending on the payment method used.
All incoming and outgoing transactions of The PHP Foundation are publicly available to view for anyone: https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation#category-BUDGET
https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation/expenses
Our foremost mission remains the same: maintain and develop the PHP language. We’d like PHP to be the best platform for users and for businesses creating web applications and APIs.
The main challenge for continuing the work of The PHP Foundation is to ensure sustainable sponsorship.
From a technical standpoint, the goal is to ensure that foundation developers work on valuable tasks.
In 2024, two of our part-time developers extended commitment to go full-time, and we contracted 4 new developers.
We have also adjusted the compensation rates for developers to better reflect the market, as the rates had not changed since 2021. As a result, our budget significantly increased.
With this plan, we estimate our annual spending cap at approximately $840,000 for developer compensation.
Additionally, we anticipate receiving €205,000 from the STF investment. These funds will be allocated to developer reimbursements and our partnership with OSTIF.org for an external security audit.
Our collaboration with the OpenCollective platform has been positive, and we plan to continue operating under the umbrella of the Open Source Collective in 2024. This means that sponsorships we receive are reduced by 10% for Open Source Collective fees and 1–5% for payment processing fees.
The PHP language is a living entity and, as such, requires continuous support to address developer issues, resolve security vulnerabilities, and has to evolve to meet the needs of the future.
Based on the strong second year of the foundation, we are excited to continue and multiply the efforts in the next years.
With your help, we continue the mission to support, advance, and develop the PHP language.