Hacker News Reader

I thought FP Complete had moved on from selling tools (like the online IDE they used to host) to being a Haskell consulting firm?

View on HN

Yup. Stack was born out of our internal build tool "fpbuild". We found that having a good build tool was crucial to our productivity. Stack was created to better satisfy our own needs, and we shared it with the community so that they can also benefit from it and help make it better.

When someone's consistently had good contributions and discussion, we've granted them maintainer level privileges. Certainly quite a lot of stack's development and maintenance is done by FP Complete folks. However, our intention is to make the project as open to contribution and feedback as possible.

You can't deny there's pattern emerging of reinventing existing Haskell infrastructure under the pretense to "move away from infrastructure that is showing its age" rather than help improving the existing one

Moreover, this new tooling/services are operated and maintained by FPC employees which, quite conveniently, moves control away from the community board to FP Complete which by design has commercial interests at its heart.

I'm not saying FP Complete is doing evil things right now but this creeping shift of powers into the hands of a commercial entity is making me uneasy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com