In a response to the "fanmail" Derick Rethans recieved and blogged about yesterday, Jason Sweat has posted a few opinions of how own about PHP and its development processes.

Sometimes it is hard to believe what some people do. I read on Derick Rethans site this post about a Fan Mail. This kind of a response saddens me as I think people are starting to forget their manners.

One thing people seem to constantly forget is that open source projects like PHP are fundamentally volunteer efforts. People are rational beings. Everything we do is "good" in some manner, because that is how we are wired to motivate ourselves to do anything.

To the issue at hand, backwards compatibility breaks suck. This issue was not communicated very well, but if you were diligent, you could find areas where this was talked about on the internals list (for example here).

He also mentions that the line that several of the core developers are adopting ("submit a patch or quit complaining") doesn't really help the community much either. If anything, it has the possibility to turn off people from PHP - and we can't have that, now can we?