Moving PHP open source forward

https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2025/10/moving-php-open-source-forward/

63•mikece•4mo ago

Comments

alberth•4mo ago

I have a lot of respect for JetBrains.

They are bootstrapped, doing $400M+ revenue, and selling to one of the hardest segments (developers who are notoriously frugal).

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs•4mo ago

>selling to one of the hardest segments (developers who are notoriously frugal).

But they don't sell to developers, they sell to suits high in the food chain of a corporation.

hu3•4mo ago

I know many developers who buy Jetbrains licenses from their own pockets.

mgkimsal•4mo ago

I'm one... I was introduced to JB by someone else who paid out of their own pocket 18 years ago. I thought he was crazy... then a couple years later I tried it in earnest and it was ... life (well career) changing.

brentroose•4mo ago

Out of curiosity: do you know why they pay for it themselves instead of asking their company to do so?

bayindirh•4mo ago

Because not all "developers" are developers in their day jobs. I'm personally a sysadmin most of the time, and I do my own R&D (mostly academic, but novel).

Some tools I like are not free, and I buy licenses by myself.

kyriakos•4mo ago

Cause many developers have personal projects they cant use company resources on

Dennip•4mo ago

TBH even that can be a hard sell at times

sesm•4mo ago

I'm paying for their IDEs out of my pocket since 2012

shagie•4mo ago

I bought my first Jetbrains license when they had an end of the world clearance sale. https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2012/12/20/jetbrains-end-of-...

... and haven't let it expire since.

vjvjvjvjghv•4mo ago

Totally agree. And so far they haven’t enshittified their products. Prices are ok and licensing terms are ok.

TiredOfLife•4mo ago

They also are the rare example of a company that actually left russia (even more impressive because the company was largely russian) unlike western and eastern companies that published some press releases, but still continue to work and collaborate with russia. Even the "privacy first" Apple continues to remove any app the russian government asks and pays millions in fines.

dreadnip•4mo ago

Both Saif and Markus are excellent choices for sponsorships. Kudos to whoever picked them. It’s a shame Juliette is losing hers, she’s also a really valued member of the PHP community and has been for a long time.

librasteve•4mo ago

It’s great to see JetBrains giving back like this …

The Raku language community has put a lot of effort into IntelliJ support, initially the Comma plugin was supported by Edument and then it was passed to the Raku Community where it is actively supported … now renamed Raku IntelliJ Plugin (RIP - geddit?)

Tools like the Grammar inspector and debugger fit well in the IntelliJ UI model.

https://raku.org/nav/1/tools

sschueller•4mo ago

That's nice, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440117 (also from today) isn't very nice.

archerx•4mo ago

It was the best of times and it was the worst of times...

cess11•4mo ago

They announced a price hike recently, and now this. I might not feel like renewing my license in a few months, actually.

mikece•4mo ago

I keep expecting them to be acquired by someone... with Microsoft being the most logical acquirer so they can go platform independent and shut down Visual Studio (finally).

hu3•4mo ago

Microsoft Rider would be welcome.

Visual Studio still would still be kept on mantainance mode for 10 to 20 years because of there's so much critical enterprise infrastructure that depends on it.

reactordev•4mo ago

As more of that migrates to DotNet Core, it’s less and less reliant on Visual Studio (the behemoth).

shagie•4mo ago

It's a bit harder to acquire a profitable company that isn't publicly traded and wasn't VC funded ( Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25466304 ).

charlie0•4mo ago

I find our community's take on paying for IDEs interesting. We're now willing to pay 20, 100, 200 USD a month for AI subscriptions, but wince at paying that for IDEs that clearly add value and also save time. I'm also frugal, but Jetbrain IDEs have been easily one of the best investments I've made for dev tools.

reactordev•4mo ago

Agreed. We used to balk at $300/yr subscription but here we are forking over almost that much a month. Granted, I’m more diverse with AI than without it but still. I’m with you, best subscription I ever made.

echelon•4mo ago

I was puzzled by that at first, but I think it makes sense if you think about it this way: we made the IDE work (including all the magical AST transformations), but the AI does work on our behalf.

zdragnar•4mo ago

Paying for an IDE is fine. Letting them train their AI on your code isn't. I don't have the rights to give access to third parties. What I'm working on isn't even anything special, but that doesn't change the fact that I don't have permission to give JB access to it.

Edit: I misread the non-commercial bit. Regardless, I making it opt-in by default is scummy, imho.

tehbeard•4mo ago

How much do you trust them to keep it to "just" non-commercial though...

joshstrange•4mo ago

A big fuss about nothing. If you don’t pay for the IDE they will train on your data unless you opt-out and they will ask you if you want to opt-out _before_ they collect any data (on first launch after the update).

If you have a subscription then it’s opt-in.

That seems perfectly reasonable.

sschueller•4mo ago

If you ask if you want to opt-out, then why isn't it opt-in which would be the definition of that...

joshstrange•4mo ago

Because they know, like everyone else, that opt-out results in more people not opting out.

Again, this is for the people using JetBrains IDEs for _free_. You can pay for a subscription and it becomes opt-in. I think it's completely reasonable for it to be opt-out or even required for the free product. Giving non-paying people a choice is a step above what I feel they are required to do (morally, ethically, etc).

hbogert•4mo ago

> A big fuss about nothing. If you don’t pay for the IDE they will train on your data unless you opt-out and they will ask you if you want to opt-out _before_ they collect any data (on first launch after the update).

Not sure what I'm missing with spacemacs + LSP compared to vscode. (Spac)emacs does not train on my data. I don't pay for spacemacs.

zb3•4mo ago

I'd sooner pay for vscode, it's much faster even though it's an electron app. Good job Microsoft (rare)!

askonomm•4mo ago

VSCode has started to aggressively force its AI slop stuff down my throat, which has turned me off from using it. JetBrains, thus far, is much less aggressive with its AI offerings. And while yes, everything can be turned off, just like all the adware and spyware in Microsoft Windows can be turned off, I'm just not interested in using a product whose defaults are _this_ anti-consumer.

zb3•4mo ago

Can't really agree since I use.. Gemini Code Assist there (obviously due to its generous free quota). GitHub copilot - at least in my case - needed to be manually configured, so I'm not sure which feature are you referring to.

askonomm•4mo ago

I'm referring to NOT wanting AI in my code editor, nor any dialogs, sidebars, popups or ads of any kind for AI offerings.

nunodonato•4mo ago

VSCode doesnt even come close to the features PHPStorm provides. It's fine if you prefer it, but the comparison is totally unbalanced.

Y-bar•4mo ago

100% in agreement, but then again I often wish I could strip out like 60% of things in PHP Storm such as the database engine, AI stuff, docker integration, VCS client, or code-with-me which I never use and take up valuable interface and resources. I prefer specialised apps such as Sequel Ace, GitHub Desktop, Docker Desktop and such.

jcurtis•4mo ago

Most of the things you listed are plugins which can be disabled in the plugin settings - certainly databases, docker & code-with-me.

wiseowise•4mo ago

OP specifically mentioned performance ("faster").

skydhash•4mo ago

Jetbrains have a code indexer which is what slows things down at launch. After that, it’s fast. Also I have those things opened for days. Emacs’ uptime is 7 days now (I restarted it to revert a config changes, the mbp itself is up 35 days).

wiseowise•4mo ago

VSCode with clangd is supersonic compared to CLion with clangd-indexer.

kyriakos•4mo ago

Indexer only actually runs if you update the IDE, otherwise it does incremental update on the changed files, which even if you switched to a branch with many changes is usually instant (or too short to realise it's happening). They optimised indexing a lot over the years.

cess11•4mo ago

You're comparing apples and cars, making your comment kind of hard to interpret.

Anyway, you should use vim instead.

wiseowise•4mo ago

Intellij IDEs are notorious memory and CPU hogs. I can't recall a single time where I opened up Intellij and didn't feel any sluggishness or stutter. It's like a huge excavator that does the job, but in such inelegant way that it kills all the joy when you use it.

VSCode/VSCodium with focused extension fly compared to any Intellij IDE.

skydhash•4mo ago

Code indexing and static analysis are not cheap. Which is what you usually want in an IDE.

tehbeard•4mo ago

I've had phpstorm get stuck indexing until I shut the app down, no matter what Stack overflow voodoo I tried to break the cycle.

Vscode and intelephense handled the same project without breaking a sweat.

I've had much better experience with IntelliJ. No matter the maven or gradle project I've thrown at it, it just works.

zb3•4mo ago

I have code indexing in vscode (in cpp at least) and it's still faster. In contrast, Android Studio makes my laptop fan go crazy even after opening a hello world app..

wiseowise•4mo ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45450870

cess11•4mo ago

That's not my experience. File access seems to be the main source of sluggishness, and it's temporary.

What operating system are you using?

cm-t•4mo ago

Let's improve "Open source". Not Open-sourcing our product...

I'd rather customize vscode with extensions.

sesm•4mo ago

Their core platform and some basic language plugins (Java, Python) are open source.

Moomoomoo309•4mo ago

https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community Here's the product, open source. There's proprietary stuff on top for Ultimate, but community is right there.

wiseowise•4mo ago

And here I thought they're finally releasing community edition of PhpStorm.

hu3•4mo ago

> Our strategy from now on is to sponsor around five open-source projects and maintainers per year. Each year we’ll select new projects to diversify our support.

I like this! Keeps the community engaged.

Looking at their list, seems solid. I have high expectations for Mago specially. Currently, PHP static analyzers are good/great. But speed can be an issue in large codebases:

1) Saif Eddin Gmati, who’s building a very promising new linter and static analyzer for PHP in Rust: Mago.

2) Markus Staab, who’s involved in tons of existing open-source projects like PHPStan, Rector, and PHPUnit.

3) Kyrian Obikwelu, who’s actively exploring AI and MCP possibilities in PHP.

4) Sjon Hortensius, who’s responsible for 3v4l.org, an online shell for PHP that’s very popular within the PHP community.

+1 spot open

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Moving PHP open source forward

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