Mission Statement

Raison d’être

F# is a programming language that runs predominantly on dotnet. The larger F# ecosystem (compiler/tooling/frameworks) consists out of open-source software. When dealing with open-source software it is important that it is sustainable and future-proof. Otherwise, as an enterprise, you cannot justify choosing F# over any other language when there are no guarantees that the language will sustain the test of time.

It is important that the F# ecosystem stays healthy and can attract new companies that will use F# in their production code. When companies make money using F#, money can flow back into the F# ecosystem. As it stands today, we believe a more targeted effort is required to achieve balance in this flow.

The Messiah problem

F# is known to face a “Messiah problem”. One individual or organisation is carrying the weight of a popular project. Said project has no sustainable funding and thus is completely at the mercy of the individual or company. This is not healthy and can lead to burn-out situations with the maintainers. Any popular project should not be abandoned when one individual or organisation does not have the bandwidth or energy to respond.

More companies should get involved in popular projects and earn a seat at the table. The prosperity of an open-source project should be influenced by the commercial user-base. It should be normalized that companies actually contribute back to their most-widely used projects.

There is no need in playing the waiting game for that matter. Don’t wait until a project lost its sole maintainer to step up and take responsibility.

Giving back

To make a substantial difference in a project (be it solving a bug or adding a feature) actual code needs to be written. Being able to code, the skill every software developer possesses, is the one thing we are after in our endeavour. We need people that use F# for developing commercial software, to do some of that coding on open-source projects.

Why people in the enterprise landscape? Because they can reliably contribute during working hours. That is the effort we are seeking companies to do. Let your brilliant engineers work on the tooling they use on a daily basis. Let us sharpen the saw and make everybody more productive in F#.

By all means, we do not wish to exclude any other F# enthusiasts, but our main focus group are developers coding in F# for a living. Companies should give back to the open-source language that is making them money. They can easily do that by granting some time to contribute to F# open-source.