That's awesome, but it's weird to me that Facebook, etc. will happily pay a senior engineer a total compensation of $200k+ yet only pledge $50k for the maintainer of a critical tool. Not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth here, just odd perception of the priorities here.
Facebook gets all of the value produced by their own developers, but the benefits of GPG are shared. If every big tech company matched Facebook's $50k, the total sponsorship would be equivalent to several engineer salaries.
I'd guess that whoever downvoted you thought this was a troll meant to start a flamewar with C++ vs. PHP and whether one or the other is more difficult (read "better" or "a real language").
It's interesting to note though, that Facebook does uses PHP and C++ extensively. And Facebook maintains a large a number of open source PHP and C++ projects. So I suppose that some Facebook engineers are more involved with PHP and some more involved with C++.
But more importantly, I don't think Facebook engineers are bound to a technology. They think about how to solve problems. If PHP is the best tool to solve a problem, they'll use that. If it's C++, they'll use that instead.
Ah I hadn't thought of that about the flamewar. I use both languages (now mainly C++ as I don't need to use PHP for the stuff I am writing anymore).
You're right about them using the right tool for the job - their entire HipHop etc. (whatever it is called now) creations to convert PHP to C++ and run a C++ web server are a good indication of this. Good point!
https://twitter.com/stripe/status/563449352635432960