Well it really wasn't my intention, but I was aware of the risk when I prepared this talk at Forum PHP in Paris. I held the closing session where I talked about what I have learned while trying to document and eventually becoming part of the "PHP development process". The gist is essentially that there is not much of a formal process or any single person/entity that is controlling things. It all works based on trust, mostly implied rules/guidelines .. although increasingly the implied stuff is getting documented. Sounds scary? Well it sounds quite reassuring to some and scary to others.

Reassuring to those that do not trust a single person/entity. I guess among the open source crowd this is actually the majority of people. But scary to those who are not yet to deep into open source. This is probably the majority of PHP developers as their choice towards PHP was likely driven by other aspects than open source. Ease of use, scalability/performance and price, the later of which is obviously a result of the fact that PHP is open source, but for all most people could care for it could be public domain.

So given this, I probably tried to speak a bit more towards the part of the audience that is scared off by trust networks. I should have mentioned that PHP is the #1 platform for the web. That it has been successful for many years already and looks back at a history of over 10 years (which is 100 years in Internet years). That the fact that most of the PHP Groups does other stuff these days and that a fair number started disappearing before PHP was really big, means that PHP is healthy enough that new developers keep coming in. Every year we welcome at least a dozen (this is just a guess as I did not try to get the actual numbers) core developers and here I am counting those who really start to become part of the active core developers. There are probably 2-3 dozen of new CVS accounts opened for php-src each year. But when it all comes down to it, people need to accept that PHP's success is a testament that humans can work together in a network solely based on trust to build something good for all.

As a means to bring more people into this trust network I once proposed the emPHPower idea. But I got kind of stuck with too little time ever since I started co-RMing PHP 5.3. Also nobody really jumped on the idea in the sense that they really pushed me to do something. Now things have flared up once again while talking to people at Forum PHP. Also after hearing David's talk on Ning I decided its better to take the risk of launching emPHPower on top of a closed source platform, than to do nothing. David reassured me that if we ever do decided to move, we could get a dump (fairly raw of course) of all the data. So lets see where this takes us ..

Thinking about it the numbers of developers I mentioned is probably too high by atleast factor of 2. So we are probably talking about 4-6 new really active core developers and at a maximum of a dozen new php-src accounts. Mark pointed me to stats on this, which do also sound like they should reassure PHP users.

Well, you didn't scare the audience *that*much* :-D
(Maybe some people, as we discussed ; but certainly not everyone ^^ )

As you highlighted, people who know how open source works (Developpers doing PHP because they want to, people working with oss every day, ...) will probably understand that PHP's way is not wrong :-)

But people coming from another background (.net for instance, for developpers, or anything else you can think about for "deciders") might have troubles understanding the philosophy behind open source -- and PHP (and PHP's development process is quite *open*, from what I can see, and what you described in your presentation).
And it's these ones we have to convince -- we don't do too bad, it seems, but we definitely have to keep working on advocacy, so that PHP does become more than a solution proposed by developpers !

So, glad to see that the idea of emPHPowered is now more than an idea !

(btw, the link "you can use the Text_Wiki rules to format your posts" is broken : 404)

Ah yes, finally fixed that link.