It's used on Pornhub so it's both very useful and very important but excuse me princess if it's not on the next Mars lander robot.

It is used all over the place in ways you don't even realize. "not very technical or providers of services to the cheap and not very technical" is a particular corner of the market that is visible and full of PHP, sure, but you don't see the huge masses of PHP code running that doesn't expose a .php on the end of the URL.

I understand why people still have this perception, I imagine due to relics of the past of the PHP 5 (or earlier) era. But those days are long gone, and I believe PHP 8 has some a nice job of adding modern features and improving developer experience.

Wordpress is the obvious answer to your question, but its codebase is admittedly still stuck in the past in many ways. Nobody would write it that way if they were starting from scratch today.

There are plenty of “serious” companies using Laravel or Symfony. Take a look around those codebases if you want to get an idea of what solid modern PHP design patterns look like nowadays. Nothing “cheap or not very technical” about them :)

It's mainly used by profitable and/or public sector orgs, so unlikely to have much intersection with the HN crowd.

Know who uses PHP? Companies that actually make money.

Some Amazon sites, they said. Lots of random companies and institutions: a Danish IT company, a Dutch cybersecurity company, Orange telecoms (in France). Various governments' sites for various services. Some BBC TV show pages, a gym group, a Japanese airline, Asahi (the brewers), Finland's state IT provider.

Wordpress and Nextcloud are two very prominent pieces of software that come to mind that are built on PHP. I'm sure there is more out there.

Facebook (although they forked it)

Wikipedia

Wordpress

Netgate (behind pfSense) use PHP for their firewall administration interface.

They recently posted about how to patch their software from the command-line (https://www.netgate.com/blog/critical-php-security-update)

Slack's backend is PHP I believe.

How old are you?

Isn't there some large php based software run by a bruised ego who can't even get his own house in order, let alone help fund his largesse, but complains about his leeches.

Hrmmm.

Is Facebook still using it?

Also, not a company but Wikimedia Foundation definitely has some funds too.

The “community” has only just managed to find the resources to maintain NTP. I think if “nobody is donating” is your standard for whether things should live or die, then we are all hopelessly fucked.

If they asked harder for donations, they would surely raise enough for maintenance.

Plenty of companies can donate 0.1 engineers to work on php, if for no other reason than to make php better for their own use cases.

In my case, I never intended on my open source project becoming popular, it just did and I had to either abandon it or make it my job. I'm not sure where that falls in your judgement.

I suspect this is also the case for PHP though.

> I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't mind at all when an open source project switches licenses or whatever. They gave away the fruit of their labor, but I am not entitled to any more of it

It only bothers me when they try to claim their new license is open source or use misleading language when it isn't. Which seems to be what 90% companies doing that do.

People can do whatever they want with their intellectual property as long as they aren't lying about it.

I'm not saying that big tech isn't hijacking open source software, but that does not mean that free or OSS was always "meant to devalue" devs or small companies.

Until very recently, big tech pumped untold millions of dollars into obliterating FLOSS altogether, calling it a cancer that will destroy any enterprise it touches.

And the indoctrination is so strong that even after all I've lived through and seen, my default is still "let's open source this".

This is why Free Software is important. It is about a lot more than just being open source.

So you think those forks will solve underfunding problem?

Awesome dude let the scabs work for free lol

I like a lot of things as well, yet I don't feel I can contribute after work. I already spend 8 to 10 hours at work. I can't find the motivation to do more.

Of course there are. But do they matter in our current system?

What about the typescript rust port https://blog.cloudflare.com/typescript-rust-port ?

Of course it has to be maintained. Things are maintained as they are sunset.