The ReScript Association

A Small Change for our Association

Last year, our platform rebranded from BuckleScript and Reason to ReScript. The Reason Association however, due to administrative reasons, lagged behind in name change until recently.

Today, we are glad to announce that our organization is now known as the ReScript Association.

We will continue on our mission to support the development of the ReScript language while leveraging OCaml as its underlying foundation.

Relation to ReScript the Project

Founded in 2018, the ReScript Association provides a legal and financial foundation for many parts of ReScript. We’re non-profit and independently funded by industrial partners, research institutions and individuals. Our board consists of three members, two of which are also on the ReScript core team (Patrick & Cristiano).

Here is some of our work you might recognize:

• Reason Conf 2018 & 2019. Post-covid, we’ll restart prioritizing these.

• rescript-lang.org.

• Community forum & server.

• ReScript related domains and analytics data.

• genType’s release automation.

• Help maintaining editor related tools such as rescript-vscode, vim-rescript and the underlying editor-support.

• Design & logo assets (together with our designer) for all of ReScript.

• Helping out on upcoming ocaml.org work.

• Experimental tools like the upcoming doc generator.

• Yearly reports for our donors and partners.

• Setting up legal contracts, hiring contractors, paying invoices, doing accounting, etc.

Benefits of an Association

The Association provides a much needed layer of protection so that we can put liabilities onto an organization instead of individuals (a crucial safeguard when things go wrong and money is at risk). As an example, organizing the past conferences or any event past meetup sizes wouldn’t have been realistic for single, legally unaccountable individuals.

We also take non-partisan ownership of some of ReScript’s essential infrastructures listed above, so that ReScript can live on past individual bus factors.

Furthermore, we serve as a communication channel for our partners and donors.

Donate

High quality, long-term Open Source work doesn’t come from some good words and pats on the back. While we do try to be efficient, past a certain point, big amounts of time and financial resources are needed to keep up the momentum for maintaining and developing the platform. To this end, we regularly raise donations to make sure that the running costs are covered, and Open Source contributors paid.

If your company relies on the ReScript platform for building commercial products, please consider supporting our efforts by sending a donation. It’s the best way to future proof your product’s foundation. Alternatively, you can sponsor individual members like ryyppy on GitHub Sponsors.

We want to take this opportunity to thank our previous and active sponsors:

• Tezos Foundation (2020-21)

• Ahrefs (2019)

• OCaml Software Foundation (2018-19)

Your support allowed us to accomplish many of the work listed earlier. Thank you!

Extra: Why did this change take so long?

We are an established non-profit organization under Austrian law, located in Vienna. We have legal obligations and can't just rename our organization as we please.

Here are a few things we had to consider:

• We wrapped up our yearly donation reports and checked in with our partners regarding our new ReScript brand and roadmap. Our partners are satisfied with our plan!

• Contrary to our compiler, Austrian bureaucracy is not known for its speed. Thankfully, in parallel, we took this time to reach a couple of major milestones on rescript-lang.org.

• We had to refactor our brand assets, rework the association site, hook up new domains, rename things while making sure nothing breaks, and communicate the goals within the ReScript team.

Luckily, most of the challenging work is done! We only need to wait for legal authorities to verify the new amendments of our statutes.

Conclusion

The association rebranding and mission alignment took longer than expected, but was a worthwhile investment. The ReScript Association is now an integral part of the ReScript project, with all the aforementioned benefits.

For further updates, make sure to join our Forum, or follow @ReScriptAssoc & @rescriptlang on Twitter!