Background
I am a software engineer with several years of experience with FP languages and have always been enthusiastic about Haskell. As I am interested in PLT and compilers I’ve had a couple of attempts to contribute to GHC solely on voluntary and free-time basis but as much as I’d like to, it’s been very hard to allocate any significant amounts of time being pre-occupied with work and extra-curricular activities. It’s also very recently that I found about cooperative enterprises (or coops) which are completely worker-owned and I’ve grown to think they might be one way of organizing worker enterprises around a common goal that benefits broader society without necessarily having to do it on a voluntary basis.
Why I think this might be a good idea
In very loose terms, how I understand it, I think coops resemble non-profit organizations in certain ways except that they are for-profit and people usually form them or join them to work and get paid.
Perhaps there’s people more familiar or even part of coops here so I won’t try to get into details but I think a coop (or multiple coops) that is organized around contributing to Haskell (whether the compiler, tooling, documentation) and promoting its use might be a way to get more people to contribute to Haskell full-time. I think certain communities are organized around this idea and work quite well. A very good example that comes to mind is Igalia, which are involved with JavaScript compiler technologies and open source tooling among many other things.
I am not saying something like Haskell Foundation should be a coop or replaced by a coop, only that if there’s like-minded people in the Haskell community who would very much want to contribute with their working efforts (writing code, documentation, etc) to Haskell but don’t otherwise have the time or the resources, they could consider coming together in a coop.
As to how this could be a profitable model - I think this could be done in partnership with companies and businesses that use Haskell already and would like to support development of core Haskell technologies but don’t otherwise have the know-how or time to do that by themselves.
So they would, outsource development efforts for say a project that implements a proposal or fixes a bug in GHC, or cabal, or something else.
Another thing that comes to mind is that perhaps such a cooperative could be involved in consulting work or be creating educational videos and courses to teach Haskell, and so on.
So what?
Well, I am only interested to hear if there’s other people who find this idea appealing or who would either join or support such a coop either with resources or knowledge. I am here out of love for the language and if I can make a normal living wage doing something of this sort and help others who might have similar aspirations, then why not?