The PHP Foundation is a collective established with the non-profit mission to support, advance, and develop the PHP language. We are a community of PHP veterans, community leaders, and technology companies that rely on PHP as a critical digital infrastructure. We collaborate to ensure PHP language long-term success and maintenance.

People and businesses may come and go, so it is vital to ensure that the PHP source code will survive beyond the current contributor base. We wish to contribute to the creation and maintenance of a stable language for generations to come.

The formation of the PHP Foundation was announced in November 2021 and the PHP Foundation initiative runs with the administration whose goal is to find such an organization structure that will ensure a long-term sustainability of the PHP language development.

The current group collective administration focuses on maintaining the continuity of the PHP project, in particular on hiring, supporting, and guiding PHP project developers. The Administration also encourages other Financial Contributors and explores strategic partnerships and needs for the PHP project.

The Administrator consists of veteran PHP core developers, PHP community leaders, representatives of the founding companies, and other key stakeholders. In 2022, this is an invitation-only group, while we’re working to get our processes solidified.

To promote transparency, we operate as a collective on the Open Collective platform at opencollective.com/phpfoundation, through which we ensure certain activities, such as selection and financing of PHP core developers contributing to the development of the PHP language. The decisions about these activities are taken by consensus by the administration members, which meet regularly, and are executed by the collective administrators.

All administration members of the PHP Foundation as well as contributors and PHP developers are expected to abide by the Code of Conduct and follow our collective expectations guidelines and Terms of Service of the platform operated by Open Collective Inc.

The primary task of the PHP Foundation is to fund developers to work on PHP. Funds collected through the Open Collective platform may be used in the first place to engage the services of PHP developers in order to further advance the development and maintenance of the language.

The current Request for Comments (RFC) is not affiliated to the PHP Foundation, and the language decisions are the matter of the PHP Internals community.

The PHP Foundation is an initiative that is supported by sponsors and volunteers. It is not a corporation or a legal entity, and it is not tax exempt. All financial contributions to the PHP Foundation are made through Open Source Collective, which ensures full transparency, for the benefit of the PHP Foundation initiative at opencollective.com/phpfoundation. The Open Source Collective is a tax exempt 501(c)(6) organization.