Is it too risky to base an actual business on the Laravel framework?

Laravel will be around for a long time. 5.1 has LTS and others maintain it too. It is built with Symphony components and has a huge community behind it like you've found here.

I say go for it, it's a great framework to use from a developer's point of view. It is friendly, extremely well written, and backed up by good documentation.

Right now I would even say that it's only valid option regarding PHP frameworks to choose from.

You could write a business application without a framework with PHP using PDO and MySQL as long as you implemented proper security etc so naturally laravel would be a good candidate for a business application it's based on PHP.

Our team are using Laravel for large ecommerce project and all works great. I recommend Laravel

As far as I remember PDO itself doesn't have a maintainer (and hasn't for some time) - so if you're worried about things I'd start there ;-) As for Laravel - it's Taylors project, but there are plenty of people contributing. If you look at his list of commits you can see a big proportion are actually merges of other peoples code contributions.

As a freelancer/contractor 99% of the time is Laravel only that feeds my family and pays the bills.

My company works 100% with laravel at web app development. Since it's open source, with a huge comunity, I see no problems.

@jekinney what is the other 1%?

First of all thanks for all your replies!

As already mentioned, my intenion was not to "diss" the framework - I find it fantastic! But I still have some reservations that the project is managed by one person only - however, @ohffs point is right, I see that now too.

Well, I am going to use Laravel for my project and looking forward to it very much. I just wanted to hear what other people thought about this.

Thanks Andreas

Correct me if I am wrong, but what I have seen (also checking the commits at https://github.com/laravel/laravel/graphs/contributors), Laravel is mostly a one-man show - it has been created by Taylor and is maintained mainly by him. Right?

Created by him. Maintained by him and another collaborator.

This leaves me with one question: is it not extremely risky to use Laravel for a big project, especially if a business depends on it?

No. It’s open source, and the latest version (5.1) is LTS.

What happens if Taylor (god forbids) gets ill?

He would go see a doctor I hope.

Or just doesn't like to work on Laravel anymore?

Giving it’s his full-time job these days, that’s unlikely. But in the unlikely event it did happen, some one else would take the reigns I imagine.

Or marries a great looking Swede, haves two children and decides that his priority is now having fun and a family?

I don’t think she’s Swedish, but Taylor is married with children.

@jlrdw I did a three month contract updating email newsletter php scripts so they could run php 5 and it was and still all procedure code php. Using mysqli etc etc. coming from c# then into php oop it was a learning curve not using classes and very little functions.