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I feel like a spammer for showing up so many places in the past 24 hours and saying “yo, the thing you say no one has built: we’ve built it, it’s right here, we’re paying maintainers every month”.
Tidelift isn’t perfect but it is real and targeting exactly these kinds of problems.
This text is not something we wrote in a rush this morning to meet the moment. We've had variations on this on our site from day 1. I believed it then and I believe it now.
And quoting from this, I wrote at longer length: https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/112202420332902529
@luis_in_brief Thank you for taking the time to add a description for that screenshot. Marking the H1 as such was a nice touch.
@luis_in_brief I still wear my pay the maintainers shirt all the time.
@mattl @luis_in_brief thank you for your service!
@luis_in_brief So, what happens when you don’t have enough enterprise customers paying to cover software that’s critical to the ecosystem?
I recently received an email from Tidelift saying that you’re reducing the amount you pay to #PHP package maintainers due to lack of demand from your enterprise customers.
However, demand has never seemed higher, to me: https://packagist.org/packages/ramsey/uuid/stats
Where’s the disconnect? Is it that PHP developers don’t buy Tidelift subscriptions?
@ramsey php-using companies don’t buy Tidelift subscriptions, specifically, yeah.
There is no developer-level price tier, which… possibly a mistake but in our limited attempts in that direction we got ~ zero traction with it.
Believe me that I deeply wish that this were different.
@luis_in_brief Sorry for the confusion. By “PHP developers,” I meant “PHP-using companies,” but I ran out of characters. 
@ramsey figured, but same result either way.
@ramsey (and again, I’m deeply sorry. It sucks. We continue to work towards success, which would include finding more customers using PHP.)
@luis_in_brief While I’m upset with the result, I don’t blame Tidelift at all.
I’ve found myself facing the long, steady decline in popularity of PHP. Almost no one is using it in the enterprise these days, which makes it very difficult for senior developers who like using PHP to find jobs paying competitive industry rates, and those of us who maintain the language and popular packages are left questioning whether it’s worth our time and effort to continue.
@ramsey yeah, it’s had a weird trajectory. Two of the biggest sites in the world, huge quantity of deployment via Wordpress, and yet… yeah.
I wonder if, Tidelift aside, there’s space for something like a collective of core maintainers, a la Jazzband or Ruby Together (brand RIP), that might be easier to fundraise for from users without a middleman like Tidelift?
@luis_in_brief There’s @thephpf, which is working on that for core developers. There’s no one (that I know of) doing that for ecosystem maintainers.
I’ve tried creating something like this, but I’m not good at these things. 
https://github.com/phpcommunity/policies/blob/main/foundation/vision.md
@luis_in_brief WordPress went in a decidedly different direction from the language. While the language itself began evolving a more robust object model with a rich type system, WordPress stuck with the procedural, loose typing of earlier PHP, so there’s not a lot of cross-collaboration with their community.
@ramsey and to some extent Meta did too with (name I can’t recall and is ungoogleable), right? And last I looked (admittedly right after we founded Tidelift) Mediawiki was simply trying to use the core language and very little else?
@luis_in_brief That sounds right. Meta created HHVM, which used to run PHP, but now it only runs their PHP-derivative language, Hack.
@luis_in_brief And, as far as I know, the only other company in the world who uses HHVM and Hack today is Slack.
@ramsey Wikimedia briefly ran on (or at least had a pilot program to run on) HHVM, but yeah, I think they had to switch away; I don’t recall the details as it was after my time.
@luis_in_brief @ramsey they switched back to PHP because PHP 7 had enough performance impact for them, and they didn't want to be tied to Meta.
@alessandrolai @luis_in_brief @ramsey Also Meta did a rug pull on maintaining compatibility with Zend PHP. That really was what got Wikimedia off HHVM and back to a Zend Engine PHP.
Thankfully the initial move of Wikimedia from Zend to HHVM because of performance had reinvigorated efforts in the PHP community to improve the Zend Engine internals. This meant that by the time Facebook did their inevitable heel turn there was Zend Engine 3 powering PHP7 with excellent performance for us to switch to.
@luis_in_brief @ramsey Hack : hacklang extended PHP and had a faster runtime, but then ultimately didn't keep parity with new PHP features so ended up being quite incompatible
@ramsey @luis_in_brief Zend also sort of filled this role for a while, although not quite as much as they probably wanted.
@ramsey @luis_in_brief @thephpf that is quite an interesting project. I can't imagine how hard it would be having funds and doing a selection process on the projects to support, nor finding a way to guarantee the money is used for the right purposes.
Perhaps the biggest issue with php is that due its wide adoption and ability to find cheap solutions for pretty much anything, we also draw in those companies that rather find the cheapest solution than the most reliable and sustainable one.
@ramsey @luis_in_brief this is so true 
I’m on the verge of switching to something that could get me a proper competitive salary, or preferably, contracts. The only reason I haven’t is the whole “experience” aspect. Not a lot of people will care about your general knowledge if you don’t have X years of experience in the specific thing