In a new post to his blog Sebastian Bergmann talks about an experiment that Derick Rethans is doing with concern to the Xdebug project and some of the bugs that have been found with it. Derick is trying out a campaign to raise pledges in exchange for bugfixes - a sort of "sponsored open source" idea.

While both Derick and I live and breathe Open Source and like to hack on code things like work and private life do interfere with the development of our Open Source software projects. So with development efforts like this we can either wait for the time when "we have nothing else to do" or try to find support from the people that use the development tools we create on a daily basis that allows to work on new features for said tools sooner rather than later. [...] A platform such as Pledgie, where many individuals can pledge small (and not so small :-) amounts of money could be the solution we are looking for [as support].

Sebastian also gets into detail about the bug that has been keeping Xdebug from cooperating 100% with the profiling functionality it offers and some missing information. A few lines missing from the output are causing trouble with more current versions of KCacheGrind because of stricter adherence to the file format's standards. If you've considered giving to a project, whether this is a bug that's bothered you or not, the Xdbug campaign could always use the motivation.