The Future of PHP
October 7th, 2005
There has been a furore over developers’ attitudes regarding backwards compatibility issues affecting recent releases of PHP. They have been criticised by the community for giving insufficient answers to some straight forward enough questions, like exactly why their script is failing, and whether changes to PHP internals are worth it. Yes, I think PHP has lost a little of its cuddly image.
PHP Everywhere rants PHP PR leaves a lot to be desired, the first comment by Derek (a dev.) sparked off further controversy by his use of the acronym STFU. Well, the use of the acronym and a few other sentences, not just that on its own 
I haven’t had to change hundreds of lines of PHP, yet, but I can understand where Derek is coming from. I think people just have to remember that PHP is an open source project that relies on the majority of people helping for free. As such people have to realise that they might get bitten by the regular releases, and that the project won’t feel too encumbered by people who have downloaded it for free anyway. “The implied warranties of the merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed” I think they put it as.
I think it’s an unfortunate case of inconsistency, the actual release notes explain to the user sufficiently why such changes are necessary, it’s just hard to envelope a widespread development community within a PR machine.