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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

There are countless applications out there still running on PHP, but if the community interest can't raise the required resources to maintain the tool, maybe it's time for it to die, or at least downgrade into maintenance mode so in time it'll become a legacy language.

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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.

My standard is not having a single full-time employee without the proper resources to maintain the technology. If the community would find the resources, all is well, but better than to run it on fumes would be to give everyone time to move on.

OK, but you understand that by that same standard you’d have sunsetted NTP. Harlan Stenn was maintaining it for a pittance; nowhere near a full developer salary.

How do they call it, it's the "business risk"? Who am I to question it. Let's just take care nobody loses an eye in the process.

Good to see the side of tech that gives us a negative reputation. Most businesses would at least pretend to care and say how important things are while being greedy in the background. Some of tech will simply say "screw it, let it all burn down and maybe we'll rebuild".

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.

The mythical engineer-hour, has this ever worked? Maybe for an already stabilished dev team...

And asking harder? How does harder look like in comparison to regular asking?

I imagine it looks like Wikipedia. Every year they have a big campaign...

But Wikipedia their main product is the webpage, for PHP, people visit it and their docs occasionally, that sure wouldn't have the same impact.

Better than running on fumes would be to honourably phase out and give people time to move on.

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