this is basically the same as releasing a working exploit.
Say I release a fix. I'm some rando but I go out to the world and say I fixed an issue with php. Use my version instead! Not telling you what I fixed, it's a secret, just trust me.
It will take, with LLM help, attackers a couple hours, tops, to reverse engineer my fix into active exploitation. Meanwhile, I'm some rando so no one's even heard of me, people who do hear don't automatically trust me to install my fix, so very few people have my fix. Meanwhile, the exploit is out there thanks to me and people are getting their sites hacked thanks to me.
That seems like a problem, no?
>I'm some rando so no one's even heard of me
Why do think people need to have heard of you. If you are reporting this issue directly to distro maintainers, security companies, hosting companies, etc first you can help use their names as part of the marketing push to raise awareness.
There was an official patch within a few hours. It probably would have been a lot longer.
And that was the screwup case. If today had gone correctly the official patch would have been out by the time the bug was public.
If you mean they should have released the patch as soon as it was done, it's true that it would have been before the bug was public... for about five minutes. When a warning a day or two before patch release works, it lets admins prepare to patch immediately and/or shut down their servers before the release time.
Even with the leak, admins still had warning and it was better than an unwarned official patch drop. Which itself is better than an unwarned unofficial patch drop. Which itself is better than an unwarned drop of exploit details.
If you are warning people to turn off their servers. You might as well give them a patch at the same time.
The PHP maintainers have generated a certain amount of goodwill over their long service, which leads downstream consumers to trust their releases over every other packaging of "PHP the open source codebase".
Nonetheless, there are countless forks of that codebase, and there are other releases than the ones made by the PHP maintainers. Any particular downstream could switch to another source of releases if presented with a compelling enough reason.