Forks

I am very much against dispersion of innovative efforts in the open source community into parallel projects that do not meet. It should never be done just out of fear not to get on SOME points what one wants. Occasionally it can be done to make a point but it should always be done with the intention to regain concentration of innovative effort in the future. Otherwise it will be almost impossible for the open source community to win from the commercial community thus in the end loosing ALL the fruits of their effort.

...as several people have commented here and elsewhere, the PHP core dev process is deeply flawed and needs some fresh blood, if not a complete re-architecting. When people use words like "Kremlin" with regard to the current core team; when core list members complain about noise on the mailing lists, implying that as the reason why useful enhancements with reasonable draft patches aren't looked at in a year, then Things Have Gone Drastically Wrong. When people express frustration to such a degree that they say things like "I used to love PHP, but I find myself using it as a last resort anymore", something is dramatically wrong — and the longer that things remain officially "situation normal; everything on course", the faster PHP will go the way of, say, Modula-2 and DIBOL.

I've had a book on standards-driven, agile Web development using PHP that's been 85% complete for some three years now. I've been dissuaded from finishing primarily by the train wreck that PHP is becoming (or has become, depending on your view). I've had a few projects that used languages like Python and tools like jQuery (as mentioned elsewhere), which both seem to have the kind of strong leadership __that listens and responds thoughtfully to its community__ that we've all wished for for PHP. How many good ideas have been left to rot merely because "some on the internals list seem to take great pleasure in just saying no", as one other commenter put it (paraphrasing)? If PHP continues to become more "Kremlinised", that doesn't bode well for ANY of us, does it?

How to go forward?

I think people that disagree with the current state of things should go on PHP internals list and express how you feel about it. Doing that elsewhere will not change things because those that have the power to act upon complains are on that list.