Corporate sponsorship

[nkosi23]

Hello,

Is there a way for a company to sponsor a feature that the community and team have validated during discussions in the related issue?

There are a number of items that have been more or less greenlighted but for which nothing has happened for years, whether it is in terms of drafting a formal proposal or proposing an implementation.

I'm sure having a clear sponsorship mechanism would allow F# to progress faster on a number of quality of life improvements. Stuff like covariance and generic constraints of type T :> U come to my mind.

We haven't been using F# for that long but i can already see that sponsoring a number of items would make plenty of sense for us. I'm sure it is the case foe other companies.

This could be a real booster for F# because the needs of the community are actually identified quite early, however implementation lags due to resources i guess. My guess is that if we could get a sponsorship pipeline going, F# could have a Blender3D moment so that high-impact features are shipped much more quickly.

[smoothdeveloper]

@ReedCopsey, is it something FSSF could organize? Meaning it would engage with the sponsor entity to budget the bounties, and community of contributors to match volunteers and distribute the budget fairly and transparently?

[T-Gro]

Hi @nkosi23 , I do like the proposal and the pursue to make F# better!

Would a direct bilaterally agreed sponsorship (company -> specific contributor via GH sponsors) work out for you?
The community of contributors is reasonably sized and feature requests can very drastically in size - I believe a per-feature bilateral agreement is better than trying to come up with a standardized approach.

I do not see any easy way how to make it legally binding and guarded by a 3rd party body. But we could maintain and provide the data to make it easier for the two sides - sponsor and contributor - to find each other and have the data proving each other's track record. Either an isolated space, or possibly even in this repo - labels "Sponsorship available" and "Looking for sponsorship" applied on issues, list of proven sponsors in a thankyou document etc.

If this repository isn't the right place to send those signals, we could think of another place. Let me run this idea by @dsyme as well.

[T-Gro]

I will see based on the first interest which phases are of most interest, and pick target based on it - it's not like it cannot be moved across repos at a later point in time :).

[nkosi23]

@smoothdeveloper @T-Gro Thanks for the interest in this and for the feedback! The concern immediately coming to my mind with the idea of bilateral deals with contributors is the potential lack of guarantee that the feature being sponsored will make it in the next release. The contributor may not have enough influence to make it happen, and as a result it is less clear to the sponsor that sponsoring the work is worth it. In my opinion, the ideal framework should remove the need for sponsors to concern themselves too much with politics.

This is why i tend to think that the ideal approach may be a middle ground between what @smoothdeveloper proposes and what @T-Gro proposes.

In my opinion, at least as far as i am concerned, a company sponsoring some piece of work would need to have a guarantee that there is an official blessing and support from the F# team behind this effort. And ideally that the work will make it into a specified release. Of course delays may happen when implementing complex features, but at least the situation should never be that the work has been done, but integrating it is a very low priority item for the F# team and the branch remains sitting there for years.

[T-Gro]

@nkosi23 : The concerns are valid.

It would still have to be someone from the "F# Language Design Squad", currently Don/myself/Vlad, putting on an suggestion to the list of "Bounty available". The suggestions would have to be approved in principle upfront and considered of priority, that all makes sense and can be guarded.

What remains a challenge are guarantees for timely incorporation - it very often does happen that addition of a new feature can introduce breaking changes to existing customers, and has to be carefully resolved. The same goes to breadth of testing - we might often require higher coverage across the compiler toolchain, incl. IDE and other services. And such bar cannot be lowered for sponsored items, quality/safety should come first.

The level of commitment I can give, also from the interest of making this sponsorship effort to succeed, is the will to provide feedback timely and integrate it when it passes all bars necessary.

If that would work, I can put it in writing incl. the reviewer commitments by repository maintainers via a pinned "Bounty program" issue. It would also explain that the additional commitments from the maintainers can cause some issues to be refused from participating in the program (imagine "higher kinded types"), as we could not promise a timely review and integration. Don is in general OK with the idea and I would also run the exact specifics by him one more time.

What do you think?
If you think this could work, would you also have some initial suggestions to apply this on already?

[nkosi23]

@T-Gro This sounds like a perfect compromise, many thanks. As far as i am concerned, the first suggestions we would be interested in sponsoring (hopefully i get this signed off by the end of the year) would be the following ones by order of priority:

• Allow the record pattern to be implemented explicitly #164
• Allow [<StructuralEquality>] and [<StructuralComparison>] for simple class types #554
• Allow implementation of generic methods with constraints of the form 'T :> 'U #255
• Covariance/contravariance language support  #162 (for the reduced version of this suggestion, only focused on consumption of covariant interfaces for interop scenarios)

[T-Gro]

All good choices!
For this initial list, my previous still applies - I will be more than happy to cooperate with anyone willing to tackle those suggestions and will ensure timely feedback and integration.

Once your company is ready, let's connect again and discuss final specifics (here or at [email protected]).

I will then put up the description of the sponsorship plan as a pinned issue in this repo, with initial list of open bounties and associated GH labels. And will get some help with socializing this idea across the web. (the people suited for implementing those suggestions will likely notice here on GH anyway, but it might inspire more companies open to sponsorship 👍 )