Collaborative Development

There are many commercial users of Haskell with a shared interest in maintaining and improving Haskell as a development platform. While this work can be too expensive for any individual company, by pooling resources the work can be funded and all of the companies involved benefit for a fraction of the cost.

The collaborative development scheme runs continuously. Companies interested in taking part can sign up at any time.

If you are interested in taking part in the collaborative development scheme, please e-mail info@industry.haskell.org.

Cost

Each company contributes £6k per 6 months (around $9.3k US at the time of writing) (plus VAT where applicable). The bulk of this is used to pay Well-Typed at a long-term work rate of £450 per 8-hour man day (roughly $700 US at current exchange rates). The payments can be annual, biannual or monthly.

How it works

The contributions from each member are put into a shared pot which is used to pay for work on the issues that the members collectively agree are most important. Member companies nominate one or more individuals to represent them on the scheme's private mailing list. The representatives submit their company's priorities and we look for overlap between the high priority tasks of different members. Thus far is has been possible to reach a consensus between the members on what should be done, but if this is not the case then we will hold a vote.

While the scheme can fund any work that the members agree on, in general the expectation is that the main shared priority of the members is related to maintaining, improving, releasing and supporting the Haskell development platform and related infrastructure, i.e. the tool-chain, the standard libraries and the packaging and distribution systems.

The work is all open source. It is either under the license of an existing project or for new work we suggest the standard 3-clause BSD license.

The activities funded by the scheme are reported monthly to the members mailing list and to the community as a whole via blog posts and with a summary posted on this site. At the end of each accounting period we will present the members with the summary of the completed work along with accounts.