Reuters reported on Oct. 24 that a nonprofit foundation supporting the open-source programming language PHP is being run by a single full-time employee.

The report said that after 2 serious security vulnerabilities were found in PHP this week, websites in multiple countries went on alert. European government websites blocked access on Oct. 21 to apply patches.

It was a scene that showed how important the 30-year-old open-source programming language PHP is to the internet. PHP is estimated to be used on up to 70 percent of websites worldwide.

Elizabeth Barron (엘리자베스 배런), executive director of the PHP Foundation, said, "I am the only full-time employee, and 14 contractors, mostly part-time, work together." Board members are volunteers who work without pay. The foundation is funded through donations and grants.

The foundation investigates security flaws and coordinates fixes with external researchers and companies such as OpenAI and security firms Wiz and Caleep.

A patch released on Oct. 21 was also produced through that process. Web security firm Cloudflare detected millions of hacking attempts, but Barron said there was no evidence hackers exploited the vulnerabilities before their disclosure or on sites that applied the patch.

AI is both useful and burdensome for the PHP Foundation. Researchers have used AI to find flaws that had been hidden for 10 years, and programmers' efficiency has increased.

But administrators' workloads have also grown. The number of code change proposals submitted to the PHP project has nearly doubled from a year earlier, but the number of participants reviewing them has not increased by the same amount. Barron said, "Reviewing code proposals and bug reports requires an enormous amount of human effort and experience."

Barron said, "This time revealed how much companies and governments depend on PHP," and added, "Compared with that, support for PHP is far from sufficient."