Hi Juliette, On Mon, 15 Nov 2021 at 23:36, <php-internals_nos...@adviesenzo.nl> wrote: > > I've been asked to post the link to the Twitter discussion in this > thread for visibility. > > The Twitter thread generated, and is still generating, quite a lot of > discussion,
I'm not going to quote from the Twitter thread partly as lot of that discussion isn't that pleasant. To be clear, this change isn't being proposed to annoy open source maintainers, it's proposed because people think it will make the language better, to a great enough value to be worth the BC break. But also, a lot of that thread is about the experience of being an open source developer is absolutely terrible due to many factors including: * an almost complete refusal of companies to sponsor work. * people who work for companies that use open source having an attitude of entitlement to 'gold level support', and will very quickly start using emotionally manipulative language e.g. "if you cared about this project you'd work harder on it". * a lack of new contributors to open source. I completely understand how all of things are pretty aggravating. It's particularly galling when a maintainer tries to get some funding, e.g. by holding back a release targetting a new version of PHP, other people will undermine that effort by forking the library and doing just enough to get it working, but not committing to do any future work. I'm in the lucky position that because PECL is so hard to use (and gate-keepered as to who can use it), that I was able to hold off doing the release of Imagick with PHP 8.0 support until a couple of companies stepped up with a (greatly appreciated) non-trivial amount of sponsorship. What the future holds for open source is unclear to me. And it's not at all obvious that open source isn't a morally wrong thing to do, as to a large extent it seems to rely on individuals subsidising for profit companies. However I don't think that slowing down the improvements in PHP core itself is an appropriate response to companies refusing to pay to support the projects they rely as a business on. I do recommend anyone who has an open source project to: * make sure you have github sponsors or other sponsoring services setup. * ask for payment for work done previously. If you've created a library that companies are dependent on, it's okay to refuse to work on it until there is a decent amount of support for that work done. You don't have to commit to doing new work until the project has a sustainable rate of sponsorship. * compare the amount of money you're getting for a project to the commercial rates for developers, and not to how much cup of coffee is. * Feel free to forward any cash you don't feel justified keeping to other opensource projects particularly upstream dependencies or tools. Or if you don't have enough time to work on that project yourself, feel free to ask for enough money to pay someone else to work on it. Once those done, it's perfectly acceptable to put a project on 'strike' until it's funded adequately and refuse to release new versions to accomodate changes in PHP. I know that saying 'no' to users is draining as they so often try to guilt maintainers into doing work for free. If anyone would like me to help explain to users "your company needs to start sponsoring this project before this project will acknowledge this issue", in any of their projects repos, please ping me on twitter https://twitter.com/MrDanack cheers Dan Ack -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: https://www.php.net/unsub.php
