My comment is more of a response to the original Typelevel fork announcement, which specifically mentioned Scala.js as evidence that their fork wouldn't do much harm. It's a pretty bad argument they're making in the first place, but it's even worse given that Scala.js is not a fork.
> On dividing the community, well, that's always the nature of open-source, but it's a virtue - after all, the ability to fork is a prerequisite for joining.
Yes, forkability of a project is a virtue on its own. But the act of forking a project is not necessarily virtuous, which is why I have my doubts on this.
I hope they hold true to their promises. It would be a shame if Shapeless' focus would leave Typesafe's Scala behind (intentional or not), which seems a plausible consequence.
On dividing the community, well, that's always the nature of open-source, but it's a virtue - after all, the ability to fork is a prerequisite for joining. And it can be argued that the Scala community is already divided between people that want a language closer to Haskell and pragmatists coming from other languages like Java, or Ruby, or Python, or whatever (and I'm in the later camp), so a fork could mean that the people wanting more type-safety in Scala, instead of bitching and moaning about it, could put their energy towards making actual improvements that could benefit everybody and that could end up being merged.
At the very least right now the goals are to keep binary and merge compatibility and there are signs of willingness to cooperate between Typesafe and Typelevel. That's a good thing if it holds. If not - well, market forces will pick the winner.