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Comment by sliq | Hacker News Reader

Some unpaid volunteers "maintain" an extremely outdated tech stack that hosts the most used programming language that literally runs the entire eCommerce world, moving unimaginable amounts of money every day.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.

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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.

> 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-joi...

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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