OpenTelemetry Accepted Elastic's PHP Distro Donation

The OpenTelemetry community has accepted Elastic's donation of the OpenTelemetry PHP Distro project. The distro addresses a key adoption barrier: environments where compiling or installing native PHP extensions is restricted. It provides prebuilt native extension artifacts, auto-instrumentation bootstrap logic, packaging for deb/rpm/apk, OTLP protobuf serialization without ext-protobuf, inferred spans, and OpAMP integration. It supports PHP 8.1–8.4 and complements the existing Composer-based instrumentation path rather than replacing it. The project is approaching its first beta release, with upcoming work on namespace shadowing, declarative config, PHP 8.5 compatibility, and central configuration. Contributors can help by testing in real environments, filing issues, and joining SIG discussions.