PHP Foundation Executive Director: Only 1 full-time employee, citing insufficient funds

Reuters reported on October 23 that Elizabeth Barron, the Executive Director of the non-profit organization PHP Foundation, which supports the open-source language PHP, stated in an email interview on Friday that the foundation is severely underfunded. She mentioned that recent events indicate a high reliance on PHP by businesses and governments, and given this reliance, PHP's funding is clearly insufficient.

Barron noted that the foundation currently has only one full-time employee, which is herself, along with 14 part-time contractors, with funding coming from donations and grants. The increase in coding related to artificial intelligence has roughly doubled the foundation's workload. The number of code change proposals received by the PHP project is nearly double that of a year ago, but the number of contributors has not doubled. She stated that reviewing code contributions and bug reports requires a significant amount of manual input and expertise.

Reuters reported that two serious vulnerabilities in PHP were discovered this week, prompting urgent patches for websites worldwide, highlighting the critical importance of this nearly thirty-year-old open-source language to the internet. The article stated that PHP may support approximately 70% of websites globally, and there is currently no evidence that these vulnerabilities were exploited before their disclosure. The report was filed by journalist Toby Sterling from Amsterdam.