[michaelt]

The PHP Foundation collects donations to fund maintenance and improvement to the PHP language, which is their charitable goal.

As far as I know, when you start a nonprofit there's no requirement that your nonprofit be particularly efficient or socially useful. You want to run a hospital that pays its CEO handsomely? Build a church in a town that already has plenty of churches? Organise international exchanges of frozen horse semen for a rare breed of horses? Run a college that charges $50k/year tuition? Pay for monks to just kinda hang out and vibe?

The IRS doesn't seem to require and proof those monks are measurably good for your immortal soul, or that there's widespread public support for horse semen exchanges, or that the college would be destroyed if they didn't have a football coach. The charity can just say "yeah we think the football team is, uh, good for student engagement, which serves our charitable goal" and the IRS goes along with it.

If a nonprofit college can pay a football team coach, the PHP foundation can certainly pay developers to work on PHP.