OCaml (formerly Objective Caml) is a functional programming language. I wondered if the economics of OCaml could provide a benchmark for the economics of Haskell.
ML (Meta Language) influenced Caml (Categorical Abstract Machine Language) (1985) and Haskell (1990). Caml influenced OCaml (1996). Caml was developed by the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA).
The Caml Consortium
The launch of the Industrial Haskell Group (IHG) in March 2009 was the subject of a presentation by Duncan Coutts of Well-Typed LLP on 4 September 2009, at the annual Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP) conference, in Edinburgh, Scotland. That conference was adjacent to the 14th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP).
The IHG presentation referenced the experience of the Caml Consortium, summarising it as: aimed for around 20 members; cost: EUR 3,000 to EUR 10,000 for 12 months (then, USD 4,000 to USD 14,000); provided OCaml and libraries under a 4-clause BSD licence; started with four members in 2002 and had seven members by 2008; initially was unable to fund full-time development; in September 2009 had 10 members. IHG’s analysis was that the Caml Consortium was not charging enough and aiming for too many members.
The Caml Consortium appears to have been framed as partnership agreements between INRIA and individual members. As at February 2026 its web site (which may be out of date) lists the following members: Aesthetic Integration, Citrix, Docker, Esterel Technologies, Facebook, Jane Street, LexiFi, Microsoft, OCamlPro and SimCorp. (The organisations in bold are identified as having donated to the INRIA Foundation between 2019 to 2024.)
It may well be that the Caml Consortium has been superceded by the OCaml Software Foundation.
The OCaml Software Foundation
INRIA has created the INRIA Foundation, which is able to host actions called ‘foundations’. The OCaml Software Foundation is such an action, created in 2017. It specifies four sponsorship levels, with annual donation levels (Bronze, EUR 5,000; Silver, EUR 15,000; Gold, EUR 25,000; and Platinum, EUR 50,000). As at February 2026, the following sponsors are identified: Platinum (Ahrefs, Bloomberg, Jane Street and Tezos Foundation); Silver (LexiFi); and Bronze (SimCorp and Mitsubishi Electric). That would imply annual donations of EUR 225,000. (All of these organisations are also identified as having donated to the INRIA Foundation between 2019 to 2024.)
The OCaml Software Foundation collects donationations and redistributes those resources. It is governed by an Executive Committee of five volunteers. However, it benefits from the administrative and legal support of two employees of the INRIA Foundation.