As someone who uses Scala daily, I don't think this is a good thing. I fall squarely into the Typesafe side of the camp—we don't use Scalaz or Shapeless or much of anything from the Typelevel project but Akka and Play are core technologies for us. We don't have a Typesafe subscription, we just use Akka and Play, a lot.
> As I observed earlier, there are already several variants of the language in existence and it has been clear for a long time that different sections of the community have different interests.
I don't think the author's examples really hold water. Nobody is using the Dotty compiler commercially, Scala.js is still in its infancy and while I know large organizations have at times run on minor Scala forks (I think Twitter used to but is now on 2.10.4), I'm not sure I believe that this is a major constituency. The official Scala is the Scala.
If this fork gains steam, it's going to be a huge opportunity for FUD around Scala and will hurt its adoptability, especially if existing Scala teams now have to choose sides.
That said, if the Haskell side of Scalaland wants to hang out somewhere else, that might be good too. Too many Scala questions on SO are answered (and upvoted) with obscure Scalaz solutions that make no sense to someone coming in from Ruby or Java.
I like functional programming. I like how monads can simplify things. But I also have to write code that someone without a lot of Scala (or Haskell) experience can maintain.