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Some unpaid volunteers "maintain" an extremely outdated tech stack that hosts the most used programming language that literally runs the entire eCommerce world,

by sliq 6y ago

Some unpaid volunteers "maintain" an extremely outdated tech stack that hosts the most used programming language that literally runs the entire eCommerce world, moving unimaginable amounts of money every day. Totally insane. We should rethink programming languages from an economical standpoint.

bibinou 6y ago
> unpaid volunteers "at PhpStorm, we are fans of Nikita’s work. We always supported the Open Source, and this felt like a new opportunity – so here we are! Nikita will continue contributing awesome features to PHP, and together we will experiment on what is possible in the realm of language tooling." ~ https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2019/01/nikita-popov-joins-phpstorm-team/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2019/01/nikita-popov-joi...
- nikic 6y ago
  FWIW, the two people who are paid to work on PHP (Dmitry and myself) both only work on the PHP implementation and not other parts of the project (infra, websites etc). The infrastructure is maintained entirely by volunteers. I am personally not qualified to do infrastructure maintenance, knowing next to nothing on the topic.
smitty1e 6y ago
It is never a problem until it is. And the idea that there is some mischief- or accident-proof alternative is, I'd argue, equally nutty.
stunt 6y ago
It's hard if not impossible to name a resourceful tech giant with best paid non-volunteer talents that was never breached or hacked. With and without extremely modern tech stacks. Totally not insane if you ask me. Security incidents can happen to anyone. The incident response matters and I think in this case those unpaid volunteers did an excellent job.
_trampeltier 6y ago
As I said another time before. At moment, the IT world builds the highest towers on very soft sand. The younger generation don't even remember in the 90s you had mostly even to pay for Linux (you had to buy CDs, because the Internet was to slow and expensive).
- Xylakant 6y ago
  Though you did only pay for the service of sending a CD to you - you were allowed to freely share those with anyone you met.
  - _trampeltier 6y ago
    From SuSE (Germany), you bought the books and the CD was a gift. That was a law thing, they couldn't sell a CD but on the same time just don't give any warranty.
wvh 6y ago
You're not wrong, but commercial entities also go bankrupt, stop funding projects or take care of code quality just enough to be able to sell a product and get the money. Clearly unpaid volunteers seem to be a successful alternative to the commercial world when it comes to general code quality and especially longevity. It's also often the case that those unpaid volunteers have a day job related to the projects they volunteer in, so there is some direct or indirect financial support. It seems reasonable to assume a large part of open-source software and infrastructure is maintained by people having vested interests in it.
barkingcat 6y ago
you'll find this exact circumstance for pretty much 80% of all software dependencies out there.

by sliq 6y ago

bibinou 6y ago

> unpaid volunteers "at PhpStorm, we are fans of Nikita’s work. We always supported the Open Source, and this felt like a new opportunity – so here we are! Nikita will continue contributing awesome features to PHP, and together we will experiment on what is possible in the realm of language tooling." ~ https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2019/01/nikita-popov-joins-phpstorm-team/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2019/01/nikita-popov-joi...

nikic 6y ago
FWIW, the two people who are paid to work on PHP (Dmitry and myself) both only work on the PHP implementation and not other parts of the project (infra, websites etc). The infrastructure is maintained entirely by volunteers. I am personally not qualified to do infrastructure maintenance, knowing next to nothing on the topic.

smitty1e 6y ago

It is never a problem until it is. And the idea that there is some mischief- or accident-proof alternative is, I'd argue, equally nutty.

stunt 6y ago

It's hard if not impossible to name a resourceful tech giant with best paid non-volunteer talents that was never breached or hacked. With and without extremely modern tech stacks. Totally not insane if you ask me. Security incidents can happen to anyone. The incident response matters and I think in this case those unpaid volunteers did an excellent job.

_trampeltier 6y ago

As I said another time before. At moment, the IT world builds the highest towers on very soft sand. The younger generation don't even remember in the 90s you had mostly even to pay for Linux (you had to buy CDs, because the Internet was to slow and expensive).

Xylakant 6y ago
Though you did only pay for the service of sending a CD to you - you were allowed to freely share those with anyone you met.
- _trampeltier 6y ago
  From SuSE (Germany), you bought the books and the CD was a gift. That was a law thing, they couldn't sell a CD but on the same time just don't give any warranty.

wvh 6y ago

You're not wrong, but commercial entities also go bankrupt, stop funding projects or take care of code quality just enough to be able to sell a product and get the money. Clearly unpaid volunteers seem to be a successful alternative to the commercial world when it comes to general code quality and especially longevity. It's also often the case that those unpaid volunteers have a day job related to the projects they volunteer in, so there is some direct or indirect financial support. It seems reasonable to assume a large part of open-source software and infrastructure is maintained by people having vested interests in it.

barkingcat 6y ago

you'll find this exact circumstance for pretty much 80% of all software dependencies out there.