I like to think of the Haskell community as a gift economy, rather than a transactional economy.
In a transactional economy, you pay for what you get, and you do what you are paid for.
In a gift economy – in software terms, an open-source project – you share freely in the good things that other people do, and you offer the good things that you do, freely to others.
There can be transactions within a gift economy. For example, a company may pay someone to get something done, but then offer the fruits of that work freely to the community. That’s still a gift!
Gift economies are vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. One version of the tragedy is simple exploitation: people use the fruits of the commons, but do not give back. But even if everyone has good intentions and wants to help, the tragedy can happen: it may be that no single person/organisation has the capacity to do boring-but-useful job X, and yet the lack of X hurts everyone, and the sum total of that hurt is much greater than the cost of doing X.
In addition, the Haskell ecosystem has reached a scale where it is difficult for individual volunteers to sustain it. We need to be a bit more organised.
That’s where the HF comes in. It can identify priorities, and execute on them; perhaps just by coordinating volunteers, but perhaps also by seeking contributions from willing donors, and paying someone to do X.
My personal benchmark is this: if a company is paying 20 full time equivalent Haskell programmers, it would be good to budget the $$ for one FTE (5%) to contribute back to the commons. After all, the team is presumably relying in a mission-critical way on the Haskell ecosystem – and it comes for free! If you had to pay for it, it’d cost a lot more than one FTE’s worth. The HF is a great conduit for this. Instead of spending time thinking which project or task is most worthy, the company can just give $$ to the HF, and trust the HF to deploy it wisely.
If all Haskell users did this, we’d have a well resourced ecosystem.
Imagine you’re an extraterrestrial sent to earth, and you have to guess which Haskell projects are funded, and which are not. Can we agree that this ET would have a hard time guessing correctly?
That may be so. But I don’t regard as a weakness. In a gift economy, who has paid for something isn’t so important. What is important is the collective will to get stuff done, and to contribute freely towards those shared goals.
Simon