Announcing the PHP Foundation

Multiple members of the PHP community, including JetBrains, today announce the formation of the PHP Foundation to continue development of the language. In addition to them, the list of members includes Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Craft CMS, Private Packagist, Tideways, PrestaShop, and Symfony.

The PHP Foundation will be a non-profit organization whose mission is to ensure the long life and prosperity of the PHP language by funding part/full-time developers that contribute to the language. It is set up through Open Collective

One of the reasons behind this decision is that Nikita Popov, one of the key contributors, has decided to switch his focus away from PHP to LLVM. Nikita Popov started working on PHP in 2011 and worked on PHP at JetBrains for close to three years, making significant contributions to three major releases there – PHP 7.4, PHP 8.0, and PHP 8.1.

Funds collected by the Foundation may be used to engage the services of PHP contributors in order to further advance the development of the language. The primary task of the Foundation will be to fund developers to work on PHP.

Visit the The PHP Foundation announcement from JetBrains for more details on how to contribute and to learn more about the future of this foundation.