PHP Foundation has one full-time employee — The Express Tribune

The PHP Foundation, which supports one of the most widely used web programming languages, has one full-time employee and 14 contractors, most of whom work part-time. This was stated by the foundation’s executive director, Elizabeth Barron, The Express Tribune reports.

Funding from donations and grants

According to Barron, members of the PHP Foundation’s board work on a voluntary basis, while the organization’s funding comes from donations and grants. She said that given companies’ and government bodies’ reliance on PHP, the project is severely underfunded.

This week, two serious vulnerabilities were discovered in PHP, prompting global efforts to protect websites from hackers. On October 21, government websites across Europe stopped working as operators rushed to install fixes for two critical security issues.

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Attack attempts and workload on developers

The foundation is working with external researchers and companies, including OpenAI, as well as cybersecurity firms Wiz and Calif, to investigate vulnerabilities and coordinate fixes, including updates released on Wednesday. Although Cloudflare reported millions of attack attempts, Barron said the foundation has no evidence that these vulnerabilities were exploited before their disclosure or on websites where updates had already been installed.

Artificial intelligence helped researchers identify issues that, according to Barron, had existed for about ten years, and increased programmers’ productivity. At the same time, it increased the workload on PHP maintainers: the number of proposed code changes nearly doubled compared with last year, while the number of project contributors did not double.