[Haskell] GHC is a monopoly compiler

[Tony Day]

I would argue that the adventure that is GHC is a natural monopoly - an
example of collaboration trumping competition.  Certainly the results speak
for themselves, and I personally find it the most satisfying, the only sane
way to practice the craft of coding.  So, as an enthusiastic user of a
monopolistic service (the best power to weight ratio I could find to
misquote Kmett), I would like to suggest to the community that we have a
respectful discussion on the implications of natural monopolies.

Monopolies have their problems.  They create power imbalances that need
active management to control.  A community should be particularly wary of
monopolies attempting to vertically integrate up the production chain into
areas where a monopoly makes less sense.  I would call the whole cabal
versus stack drama a text-book case of over-reach. Everyone agrees stack
operates at a higher level of abstraction then cabal, on top of it is
accurate.  Cabal shouldn't even be allowed to compete above it's current
abstraction point.

Haddock is another example of being blessed by ghc.  It hits a corner-case
of perfection for the "I'm a hackage library" monopoly.  But the outside
world of documentation, editing, rendering and conversion is invisible to
this monopolistic use case. We are forced to learn and use haddock, and,
for those of us with documentation needs outside hackage, the resultant
workflow is cruel and unusual.

GHC is a great compiler, but should actively be discouraged from
monopolizing the associated tooling and documentation chains.  There is
evidence of healthy open-source competition and significant gains to be
had, and Haskell runs the risk of missing out.
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