Why is JoliCode backing the Symfony 5.3 release

Since the beginning of the week, JoliCode sponsors the Symfony PHP framework 5.3 release. In just over 15 years, Symfony has become a major player in the PHP world, its components serving as the technical foundation for many products on the market.

One of JoliCode’s core values – since its inception – is its independence. We always refused restrictive commercial partnership agreements (we prefer friendship and trust), as we want to choose our working tools according to our technical readings, experiments and convictions, not the “small lines” of a contract. Over the years, we have been very cautious with this independence value (and we will continue to do so), but we thought it was the right time to show our support to Symfony, as a major tool of the PHP ecosystem.

This choice of sponsoring doesn’t mean much in itself – to us, it’s mostly,, a simple way to show our attachment to PHP. It’s also a very punctual way to thank Symfony and its contributors, in the form of a material boost. Over the years, Symfony has proved itself very useful to Jolicode (and our clients), and we thought it would just be “right” to give back a little to this great tool that helps so much the professional community we work in.

Like many other projects in the web developer’s toolbox, Symfony is the product of the exceptional work of thousands of contributors who develop, document, test, review and comment Pull Requests, or simply open issues when bugs are discovered. We believe in this collaborative approach not as an absolute dogma, but thanks to a factual observation: Open Source tools like Symfony are at the roots of many projects. Such tools are a very concrete way to create new things, to open new doors. Many websites exist today – both large and small projects – thanks to Symfony and many other softwares made available for free by their authors.

The redirection.io platform, a sister company to JoliCode offering a top-notch HTTP redirection service for agile brands and business websites, is also supporting Symfony for the same reasons, and sponsors the Routing component of the 5.3 release – you can’t make this up! ;-)

Sponsoring a release is not necessarily the only action we undertake to support the values of sharing knowledge and know-how. For example, we regularly publish articles on this blog, that we hope will be found interesting, well-written and documented, because we think that it can be useful to our readers. We frequently contribute to Open Source projects; we have launched some of them and willingly participate in others, following the philosophy of “what serves me can serve others”. We are also deeply involved in Developer Communities in other ways such as participating in conferences, or being member of associations like the AFUP or the AFSY.

The Symfony Backers Program has just opened. Just as many tech companies sponsor SymfonyLive & SymfonyCon conferences, we strongly encourage other companies in the Web ecosystem – our colleagues, friends, customers – to support Symfony or other Open Source projects, which deserve it.

No doubt you would understand now why we are taking this opportunity to thank Fabien, Nicolas, the framework Core team members and the thousands of individual contributors who helped Symfony become the amazing project it is today!