Man, of all the things Mozilla produces I would argue MDN is their most valuable product - as in, if the money really ran out, this should be the last thing to go. I get cutting the other developer outreach programs, they seem like a luxury, but MDN is like wikipedia for browser devs. It's totally indispensable.
I said this about Firefox itself, but if they charged to directly sponsor MDN I would sign up. They can even create support tiers that don't really mean anything other than it gets appended to your user role, maybe badges per month per role or something so it stays immortalized.
What I said about Firefox Developer Edition: if they kept it free but added a paid version, I would pay for it just to directly support Firefox development.
It has to be 100% clear that all funds need to go towards MDN and Firefox Developer tools / Firefox itself in order for me to remain subscribed to either one.
Firefox has been my browser for decades now, and MDN has been my bread and butter since whenever I discovered how useful it was.
Wow you weren’t kidding. I went to the payment page at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ and it says they only have 44 monthly supporters. I’m going to donate now though, thanks for the heads up on this.
Edit: Unfortunately It appears that you can’t donate to MDN anymore because the “manage payments” page 404s.
That was a limited time experiment, which got shut down after it didn't prove very successful. But from that, it's probably a fair guess that it would not perform well if rolled out again today. There are a few very vocal people who want to support MDN, and that's great, but that's probably not true for the bigger audience. :(
I was about to comment this. Its a damn shame they didnt leave it active and lightly tugged people on MDN about it... Hell even a few social media esque campaigns about it to raise awareness would of not hurt.
You may want to see why Thunderbird had to create their own foundation just to fund their project. Firefox makes most of its income from the search engine deal with Google it seems. Looking at the Mozilla Foundation (not to be confused with the corporation which is what maintains Firefox) their initiatives dont even mention Firefox. They really need to make it very transparent where your money ends up.
They list a buncha awards and convention type events, that's not helping Firefox at all.
From what I understand Firefox is only a source of income, not a prioritized product.
And yes: IMO this is kibd of backwards. Firefox has been their biggest contribution to the open web and it seems they are treating it as just an income source.
This is disappointing, but not surprising: there seems to be very little interest these days in funding the sort of work that created computers, the major operating systems and the internet. Software and tech is basically treated as a cost by everyone.
Totally agree, but I'm not sure which government would fund it. I know the US heavily funds quite a few dev tools, but would be reluctant to fund large consumer facing tools without multiple country cooperation.
(EDIT: mainly talking about Firefox here)
I don't think it's inherently unprofitable (and neither is most public infrastructure), but more that any possible step towards more profit would be almost always against the users' interest.
Like with motorways and much of other public infrastructure, competition is basically impossible (and would be too inefficient) due to the sheer scale of the project, and letting a for-profit run it would be nothing but harmful to the public.
We're not saying Firefox isn't being maintained, we're saying donations don't go to Firefox, they go to the foundation which is also apparently funded by Firefox. Something really needs to change... We shouldn't have heard about basically what is crucial for developers being scrapped to keep the show running.
No, Firefox is developed by Mozilla Corporation, which is a for-profit company owned by Mozilla foundation. As I understand it, this opens up the possibility of revenue sources not available to a non-profit for Firefox, but otoh, means you can't donate to support Firefox.
I asked a question about the CEO & management soon after they announced the layoffs and the post had a few very good observations by others - then someone flagged the post and only my comments/responses.
Maybe she or her umpteen executives were on a mission to be busy lol.
I would also assume that there are conferences, grants/sponsorship/stipends, CEO pay, etc.
The audited report lists conferences/conventions meetings and advertising/promotion, two items that some may not want to contribute to.
I'm making no judgement regarding whether these expenses make sense or not, just pointing out something that someone who wants to finance Firefox and MDN may not want to contribute to.
Of course, unless you trust the organization to actually honor the intent behind a donation for a specific purpose, such donations are moot as long as the organization receives enough general-purpose donations: They can just put 100% of the money tied to a specific purpose behind that purpose, but reduce the amount of "general-purpose" money that would otherwise have gone to that purpose by the same amount.
> "Combating Misinformation" is not something that I'd consider one of the core tasks of Mozilla.
Why? Misinformation is, this should have been proven by now, the greatest threat to democracy in recent history.
Browsers, social networks and search engines are the entry point into the web, they have to act with the responsibility that comes with this position (and yes I know neither Facebook nor Google have done a good job the last years).
Long story short, donations to the Mozilla Foundation go to the Foundation, while Firefox, MDN, and others are managed by the Mozilla Corporation (a subsidiary of the Foundation).
If you consider Mozilla as merely a for-profit business, no. If you consider Mozilla's mission statement, the ROI is absolutely through the roof.
"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."
Everyone else is talking about MDN as a public good in line with the foundation's mission, but it's also economically beneficial to Firefox. The existence of solid web development documentation with feature support matrices encourages FF-compatible development, which helps FF user retention when sites continue to work in FF.
As the lead for Chrome Developer Relations, the way I classify why it's important is: we want the web to succeed and for people to prefer and use the web over other closed platforms. To do that we need people to prefer the experiences on the web. For people to prefer those experiences, the sites and apps need to exist and and to work well, for them to exist and work well developers need the tools and references easily accessible in one place. That place is MDN and that's why we help contribute to it (too little it seems, still).
As the lead for some stuff at Chrome, what's your stance on Google [ab]using its strong market position to promote Chrome basically through all possible channels and muscling out Firefox down to sub-10% market share? "Upgrade to Chrome" on Google's main page irrespective of what the user's current browser is, etc.
Are you happy with the resulting browser landscape?
Are developer relations the people who find out what things are blocking developers from using the web and what things might attract them? Just curious, I hear the term developer relations thrown around a lot
Unquestionably! It's that valuable of a resource. I wonder if a license could be written that allows free use for individuals but requires businesses to pay for access. Obviously it would just be on the honor system but a lot of businesses would pay for the license just to cover their butts.
I’d be curious whether they could make the Wikipedia model work, especially with corporate donations. I’d personally pay just as I do for Read The Docs but it takes a bunch of people to match a single company’s small change funding.
Fuck yeah if they branch out to become a separate entity, I certainly wouldn't put a single cent towards a company that's cutting off MDN just like that.
Is it the most valuable contribution to Mozilla's mission?
> Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
Note that MDN is a collaborative site. The members of the MDN Product Advisory Board[0] gives an idea of the organisations involved in maintaining it. It's bigger than Mozilla. See also the 2017 announcement[1].
Anyone can contribute. A big part of Mozilla's job is maintaining and improving the tools and process to do so. That said, I wouldn't want to downplay the contributions to the text made by Mozilla.
From a friend, post layoffs there are some good people left but also lots of grifters/dead-weight, especially in the upper echelons (not referring to engineering specifically)
And also implementors of the web specs and APIs (browsers and others) imo should fund it more effectively (disclosure, I lead Chrome Developer Relations).
Despite all the people in this thread saying they would happily donate directly to MDN, no one has responded here noticing that the donation page doesn't work.
Who will add updated content without the tech writers? It is probably too much to expect the core engineering team to also double as the doc writing team in the longer term.
Sounds like they're planning to basically hand MDN over to either an independent foundation or consortium setup just for it, or let MS/Google take stewardship (Apple prominently but perhaps unsurprisingly missing from the Advisory board)...
Whatever happens I hope the docs are not left to languish outdated and progressively less useful. MDN is literally the wikipedia for web developers.
I also don't see why efforts can't be made to monetise the site with contextual ads. Hosting reasonable ads is better than simply dying off for lack of self sufficiency. If the issue is because of ties to the non-profit foundation then changes can be made...
My team (Chrome DevRel) is a member of the PAB, I'm looking forward to this week's notes being released in public. We're looking at many options to help secure the future for MDN with Mozilla.
In terms of who will add content, we still have our tech writers contributing. But the current volume of content across the site will be lower.
My personal opinion is that whilst MDN has an amazing community of people who write for it, it needs a permanent staff to ensure the reference materials are suitable for developers. I want our team to work out how we can get back to having a permanent staff to support MDN and have that staff be agnostic to browser vendors.
Maybe MDN should launch a KickStarter every year: "OK, we're up for annual renewal. If we meet our goal of $xx,xxx, MDN will stay around for another year. If not, we'll shut down our offices, lay off our staff, and just publish a static mirror of the current content."
An interesting solution could be to make MDN a paid site, as many suggest, but also offer it to libraries and universities for a token fee. The process is already in place and successful for scientific journals and encyclopedias, so the friction should be low.
Then, the paid version would be the most convenient and attractive to anyone with $5 a month to spare, but everyone else could get access through the nearest library or university, a one-time hassle with equivalent access after.
As a bonus it raises awareness and usage of libraries, which is good for everyone.
I think it would be ok if they were charging for _some_ of the content. Docs could stay free and they could charge for development courses. They could even make introductory courses free and charge only for advanced topics.
Another example - browser compatibility matrices. They could be free just for the current versions of browsers and you'd have to pay for historical and future (i.e. development versions) data.
I think it's possible to find a balance between making the essential knowledge free so newcomers can join the industry and charging those who already have a source of income. I know that 5$/month can still be too much in some parts of the world, but this could be addressed with regional pricing.
Yes, "freemium" -- that is the way. Another piece of content that could be premium at are the examples. Professional editors are necessary, to impose structure and standards, but as Stack overflow shows, technical knowledge contributions can be gotten for free with a bit of gamification.
Google is slowly trying to supplant that with https://web.dev/ They couldn't care less if MDN lived, and would be quite happy if MDN (and Mozilla) died, no one would challenge them on standards and technologies etc.
MDN and web.dev play completely different roles for now. Also MDN doesn't factor in challenging Google for web standards and technologies, Firefox team might but MDN definitely doesn't
Sounds like they are leaving the site up but not writing new content? That could actually be worse than just taking the site down as it will quickly grow outdated.
> We recognize that our tech writing staff drive a great deal of value to MDN users, as do partner contributions to the content. So we are working on a plan to keep the content up to date. We are continuing our planned platform improvements, including a GitHub-based submission system for contributors.
Looks like they won't write new content themselves, but will have a system for keeping content up to date
All the members of the PAB are working with Mozilla to support them in the long term. We believed it's a shared responsibility to ensure that the web platform is documented well.
I've long avoided w3schools, but a lot of comments on various HN threads suggest the site has improved a lot over the past few years. If true, this makes me less worried about the future of MDN.
Plus there's other reference sites I find myself using from time to time, for instance Can I Use[1] (which has a Patreon) and QuirksMode[2] (supported by donations). Monocultures, in my view, are not good for the environment - and that includes coding reference sites.
> The other areas we have had to scale back on staffing and programs include: Mozilla developer programs, developer events and advocacy, and our MDN tech writing.
> We recognize that our tech writing staff drive a great deal of value to MDN users, as do partner contributions to the content. So we are working on a plan to keep the content up to date.
The stated rationale for the "re-org" (read, layoffs) was to shore up the financials and explore new revenue opportunities. Here is a novel idea that I will provide at no cost:
Charge for access to MDN, structure the legal particulars so that revenue goes to pay the tech writing staff, covers operating costs, and provides the excess to the Mozilla Foundation. Use the resulting goodwill and attention as a lead generation mechanism for whatever other projects Mozilla tries to create and charge for.
Market validation you say? People won't pay for documentation you say? The sole developer of the macOS app Dash[1] makes a fairly decent living selling an app that merely allows you to search freely available documentation offline. MDN has real value that people, myself included, will pay for. Just this week I have referred to MDN documentation at least a couple of hundred times.
So you want to use others' hard work for your own financial gain? That doesn't seem overly fair.
I get your point, in a perfect world folks like you might land a nice job and kick back 10k as a thanks. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen, so alternatives are necessary.
This is the exact comment I wanted to make. I rarely use MDN, but would pay for it anyway, because when I need it, I really need it and there is no high quality alternative.
Absolutely. I’d be willing to bet many thousands of developers would pay at least $5/mo for access (sign me up!). That’s at least 1 full time well-paid tech writer. And I think my estimate is highly conservative 1) I’m sure it could be more than $5 and 2) I didn’t include any corporate payments.
My build on this: Mozilla, send out a poll and see if this is something people would thrown down $$$ for.
Would you pay $5/mo to support it, even if it were fully public? or only if it goes private?
I'm pretty sure a "good enough" alternative would pickup the visibility, such as w3schools, and many won't be able to justify the expense of there isn't some kind of exclusivity.
(there could be some sort of member/sponsor program, but having tried to run those, they have alot of overhead)
Only if it stays public. It was hugely important for me learning web dev, still is, and I would like it to continue to be for everyone entering the profession
> Charge for access to MDN, structure the legal particulars so that revenue goes to pay the tech writing staff, covers operating costs, and provides the excess to the Mozilla Foundation. Use the resulting goodwill and attention as a lead generation mechanism for whatever other projects Mozilla tries to create and charge for.
This doesn't sit very well with me, as someone who has written a few security-related articles on MDN and generally tries to contribute to e.g. the compat-data repository as I get time. I'm motivated, just as I would be with an OSS PR, by the work being high quality and freely accessible to all.
It's a wiki. Anyone can help contribute. Do the professional technical writers do an excellent job as changes land in Firefox? Yes. Is it fair to charge for access to contributions that both the paid technical writers and the community have contributed under the impression that this is a free resource in the public domain? I'm not sure.
Is there a middle ground whereby we can still fund hosting/maintenance/professional technical writing but give access to a) folks who perhaps otherwise wouldn't have the means to pay for the documentation and b) folks who've contributed to the resource? Perhaps.
For what it is worth, I know that as much as I find MDN useful today I recognise that I would personally find it extremely hard to justify to myself for paying for it. And I do front end dev professionally and also for fun so I guess I might be the "target market"?
It will just end up like the news sites with a paywall - "oh the want me to pay <clicks back and goes to next search result while moaning about why Google even includes these paywall sites in results>
I bet I am not alone - it is just a reference and any other site can cobble together some examples that 99% of visitors just want to copy-paste anyway so they can get back to their work or fix that weird error (e.g. w3schools)
There are also questions in my mind about who would pay: the industry veteran who remembers the days before we had developer tools, or the person just starting out who doesn't really know anything yet? Or someone else? Neither the veteran or the newbie would get much value out of that $5 in my mind, leaving only a hollow rump of the middle-ground of people who care enough to pay for access, but also don't care enough to learn so that they won't actually need the subscription?
It doesn't make sense. MDN will drop down the search rankings and some other site will provide reference material for DOM + JavaScript.
I think you have misconceptions around how much people want to pay for documentation . Usually people come across MDN docs while googling for some keyword . At times MDN is the first search result, but if the users hit a paywall, they will gladly go to the next search result - usually w3schools . It is not a definitive resource but is good enough for most general use cases.
As an example , Wikipedia is used much more than MDN docs as everybody in the world can find something useful on Wikipedia but MDN docs appeal only to web developers . Yet every year; Wikipedia has a hard time gathering donations to run their site with a skeletal crew and they have to resort to huge banner messages exhorting users to donate.
Wikipedia doesn't "need" to appeal to users for donations. They currently have more money than they'll ever need to develop wiki and to run wikipedia. They do that so they can add more staff and more projects. Which is a mistake IMO, they should stay focused on what they do well, in turn they need a smaller amount of money every year, and because of that they could take their current principal stuff it in a trust fund, and fund themselves virtually forever. Of course Mozilla could have/should have done the same thing: stay focused on the browser, forget all the other crap like FirefoxOS and save money to put in a trust fund and eventually achieve some org level financial freedom. That wouldn't be as cool tho.
Mozilla's contract with google was just renewed, and is roughly the same amount of money they were making before. COVID had essentially no impact on their finances, and this is all corporate PR bullshit.
What exists on MDN today is easily worth more to an individual than they pay (in U.S. dollars) for a single coffee in a month. Putting that towards a monthly subscription for a vital resource might not come naturally to people given the present "culture of free" on the Internet, but someone has to be first.
Some commercial model would be ideal, but having a paywall would mean that the influence of MDN on the large web developer community will become than much smaller.
That would mean less developers having easy access to information that would help create write solid, browser-agnostic websites and applications. Which will be a loss for everyone.
Except, perhaps, for Google and the Chrome team, as the makers of the currently dominant web browser.
That would explicitly go against Mozilla's goal of having an open web. A paywall for such a fundamental resource would not be a good thing.
Perhaps there should be a more direct way for people and organizations to contribute money to the docs (or a paid App or other value add) but the docs themselves shouldn't be closed off.
> That would explicitly go against Mozilla's goal of having an open web. A paywall for such a fundamental resource would not be a good thing.
It doesn't have to. The content could remain out in the open.
Although you are correct in that I am suggesting a paywall there are other ways this could work:
- Subscribers could set MDN project priorities in terms of which technologies get focus, topic expansion, expanded example code, etc.
- Early access to incomplete documentation could be given to subscribers.
- Issues with documentation or example code coming from subscribers could get priority treatment.
- Offline versions of the documentation could be subscriber exclusive.
The bottom line is that a tragedy of the commons situation needs to be avoided. Is a paywall really worse than letting bit-rot settle in on the existing MDN content?
I would also pay for it for nothing extra at all. Give paying members a special icon on the MDN discourse or something. Maybe a "Sponsored By" page you can get your name on if you want it there. I pay for non-profit news that is free to all, I pay for some apps that have basically identical free versions. Please take my money! Offering a free product doesn't mean you're not allowed to ask for support.
We have seen time and time again that there is a vast chasm between the number of people who say they will pay for a resource and the number of people who actually do so, when the rubber meets the road.
This is actually quite apparent on HN. There's a train you can follow. At the head of the train, going choo choo, is "I would pay $5 for this". The rest of the cars go like this:
- Oh, but not if I have to use Paypal
- Oh, but not if I have to use a credit card
- Oh, but not if I have to use a trackable payment system
- Bitcoin is trackable, Monero or never
- So I have to go through KYC just to pay Mozilla? No fucking way
- 100% of the money should go to tech writers
- Money is fungible, so how do I know they aren't just taking out other money to send this there
- Ever since Pocket, I've changed my mind
- Ever since Brendan Eich, I've changed my mind
- How is it fair that both the tech writer who wrote 20% of the content and the new guy get the same amount from donations?
- If DevTools isn't included there's no point
- If DevTools is included there's no point
And then, in the end, one guy gives like $5/month because he wants to prove to himself that he was honest.
In fact, I'll tell you what: if 50 people reply to this comment pledging $60/yr ($5/month), I'll have someone set up a GoFundMe with a goal of $120k/year to fund one technical writer full time (and his associated payroll taxes etc.). I'll match that with $5k of my own money and I'll handle full comms with Mozilla to try to get them to hire someone. So validation is 2.5% of the final sum. Show me.
EDIT: By the way if it hits 50 many days after (when I won't be notified), my email is in my profile if you want to prod.
Pledged! (My email address is available via my profile.)
But also, for the 1st part, LOL! (IMO, HN needs to learn to laugh at itself from time-to-time.)
And also, for the 2nd part, thank you for organizing this.
Because I'm bootstrapping for my retirement fund, I'm not particularly flush for cash, and so too often I'm a freeloader. This is great though - I hope you get it together.
One final thought is that Mozilla executives don't really deserve to be the custodians of MDN anymore, and so perhaps as a community we need to be looking for ways to liberate MDN from Mozilla. For example, the technical writer, rather than being a Mozilla employee, could be an independent MDN contributor collaborating with Mozillla employees, and contributing under CC-BY-SA 2.5. [0]
> Mozilla executives don't really deserve to be the custodians of MDN anymore
Whatever financial/operational reasons there were for the recent cutbacks, the current situation of MDN (and Firefox) confirms my doubt and distrust of the leadership and management. It's been terrible for their reputation.
Of course, as a for-profit, they're free to prioritize business and financial sustainability. But the decisions they implemented - and how they went about it - seemed to have no respect for what makes Mozilla actually valuable (not just in terms of profit, but in social good and long-term role in the market).
They should have started by eliminating the bloat from the top, instead of laying off hard-working teams, experts and specialists that produced the real value.
In the end, if these projects can adapt and survive, it might turn out to be a good thing, to become more community-supported and independent of Mozilla. On the other hand, it seems natural for Google or Microsoft to swoop in as "evangelists of the open web" and take these projects under their (massively funded) wings.
As a freelance frontend developer, you only have to calculate how little you have to work to get this $60/year. So it's a no-brainer for such a valuable resource as MDN
Mozilla has earned vast sums of Google Search money over the last decades. If that money had been invested into an endowment then Firefox and projects like MDN could have independent funding. Instead they used it on what? So now we have to donate money to an org who's executives make more each year than our home is worth? No thanks.
I worked as a professional full-time technical writer, salaried with benefits and options, for four years across two companies. I exited the field entirely because even factoring the costs beyond salary I never came close to clearing US$100k/year spent on the role, nor did any of my colleagues outside of management (which notably wasn't a writing role).
There was no path toward that number without moving to what were considered "technical" roles on other teams, including when I moved into a tools development role within the tech writing team.
So I wish I, or anyone I've worked with, or any full-time technical writer I've ever spoken to, got that level of compensation for technical writing. I'd still be doing it if I'd gotten paid that much.
I'm not saying nobody gets paid that, someone probably does or I'm sure y'all wouldn't talk about it. But god I _wish_ I'd ever actually seen it, just to know it was out there.
In my limited experience, the role is titled “software developer” or similar, but is actually mostly a technical writing role pretending to be development in order to justify the necessary expense. With occasional development duties. But that’s the only context I’ve seen it approach that figure (including taking into account benefits like health insurance).
Please don't send Mozilla your money...everyone's donations before then went to exec millions of dollars per year salary.
Mozilla is sitting on $500M cash reserves + $500M / year from Google. Don't assign lack of money as the real reason of MDN falling: lack of product direction and leadership.
All the money this guy donates is just going to be added to the CEO's salary
If you really love MDN or whatever then why not fork it and pay for hosting its competitor. Just import all the pages to Mediawiki and put it up online.
At the time I write this the parent comment is fairly grey.
I've been pondering what to do or write for a couple of minutes already now but I think I should write something.
I just wanted you to know that (and this is hopefully a good thing) I was about to downvote you, not becaise of who you are or what you do but because the comment was so out of place in context. I even considered (in fact still consider) the option that you are trolling.
I guess this is the case for many here: we might or might not be the biggest supporters, but ai guess the majority of us are "nice" people abd the downvotes have been piling up because 1.) the comment feels extremely out of place 2.) being posted from a throwaway (like mine) makes us suspect trolling 3. I've also considered that maybe GP has done something for your community but it was not obvious neither from your post, GPs profile or anything I could see.
Hopefully the fact that your comment possibly got crushed for stylistic and/or context reasons makes you and people like you feel a bit safer. :-)
PS: I'd feel the same urge to downvote if someone used half their post to describe how they were a
- Buddhist with small children
- Atheist with small children
- Christian with small children
and yes, you'd find me in one if the above bullet points.
PPS: I'm an oldtimer around here.
PPPS: I also miss a general "flag for moderator attention" that might get mods attention but won't have negative consequences for the flagged.
I said « include Christians », not exclude others. Why do people always assume that?
Anyway, what I conclude from being downvoted to hell is that Mozilla is an anti-Christian organization, and it’s pretty much admitted and voluntary from the community. As a side note, it converges with Silicon Valley S05E05, where nobody has a problem the guy is gay, but everyone has a problem with the guy being Christian. The startup industry is profondly anti-Christian, with various beliefs and prejudices that I have no force to endure anymore.
And, honestly, that is the last drop the tipped the jar for me.
Is basically a wiki right? Anyone can contribute? What proportion is written by paid staff and what proportion is written by public contributors?
It seems like it suffers from a free rider problem which isn't at all helped by the lack of focus (and funds) in Mozilla's initiatives. I understand that people are sick of corporate greed, out-of-touch execs, etc but I don't blame Mozilla for deprioritizing it when they literally are running out of money to pay staff (this is a whole other issue in and of itself).
It should be spun out with formalised its goals then go full wikipedia with annual fundraising or donation drives. If this fails they should look to be subsumed under similar non-profit foundations who can afford to maintain it. The free rider problem is not easily solved and if it isn't I expect MDN to decay, there isn't away around this.
This is a sad post. The MDN web docs are the internet handbook for javascript, html, and css, besides other browser technologies. this needs to be enshrined and freed of financial constraint. we are kind of failing.
Biased opinion. It depends if you've articulated the value of the function well. I do fear that if it's seen as a marketing function then it's an easy place to start tightening belts. If it's integrated into the product team then it's harder, imo.
They need to make MDN a paid site for developers. Can work with organizations to get access to MDN content. They can accept donations or a small yearly fees. If organizations can sponser can also contribute will be a nice addition so it can keep fees minimal to individual developers
I totally disagree with making MDN a paid site ... Are developers supposed to pay to develop? ridiculous .... MDN should be kept open to contributions and donations but putting up a paywall only makes things worse for all of science in general.
> Are developers supposed to pay to develop? ridiculous
No. Developers are supposed to pay to access the hard work of the technical writers and developers who maintain MDN. I don't understand why you think it's self-evident that this work should be free.
The W3C has many wealthy companies as participants, they should support it more too given that each and everyone benefits from MDN being the central place for all browser API reference.
I lead of Chrome DevRel team and we contribute with tech writer support and work on the PAB, it appears too little still but there are many web standards aligned companies that could provide more support because they directly benefit from MDNs existence.
Exactly... I think that each browser should be responsible for offering its own documentation on its web APIs (after all, documentation is what allows developers to develop on your platform)... This is not the case, And although some browsers offer technical help (like your team), I think that all browsers should offer both technical and monetary help to MDN, or else, each browser finances its own documentation repository.
me too but how else we can save it from going stale. Even science research needs funding. If orgs can donate as benefit of its employee. If not its up to individuals
The sponsor program page there is up but the program itself doesn't seem to be anymore when you try to go through it. I believe someone else mentioned it was an experimental run in the past that got axed because nobody paid.
The first time I saw Crash Worship, I thought they might sacrifice me to whatever horrible god they were following. When they didn't, I never missed them when they came back through town. I miss that band so much
And ruin any semblance of autonomy and not being beholden to the whims of the same kinds of people who add undeletable apps and spyware to new phones and laptops?
The following is my personal impression of the situation, which I base on following everything Mozilla closely for almost as long as it existed, particularly closely in the most recent years. I also have seen both Baker and Surman speak - as well as Eich and Beard many others of note - both in public talks but also in smaller, more private conversations. And I saw a lot of internal mozilla discussion over the years and talked to quite a few people. While I was active in the mozilla project for some time, I have never been on their payroll, neither as an employee or contractor.
Right now mozilla is very much beholden to the whims of the their CEO and has been for a while (when interim-CEO and before that when Mozilla Foundation chairwoman). Baker - additionally to being the current CEO of the Corporation - chairs the board of directors of both, the Foundation and the Corporation. The current Mozilla Foundation president, Surman, is her long-time yes-man, as well. Chris Beard, former CEO taking reign after Eich's departure - was a Baker yes-man as well.
She managed to surround herself with an army of yes-people. She effectively is a "(benevolent) dictator" like a SV billionaire would be, except the billionaire probably wouldn't spend so much mozilla money on themself and their cronies.
To be fair, Baker played an instrumental role in getting Netscape to release the initial code and setting up the Foundation, and was a good steward of the Foundation for a long time.
She played a bit of a role in what started the downfall of mozilla (peaking at burning stacks on money on FirefoxOS; tho some good work came out of it that, it's still a huge net negative), but it was mostly other people who were a little bit... too enthusiastic about what mozilla can achieve, spreading resources thin.
After the failure of FirefoxOS, mozilla leadership got scared and clueless what to do next, and looked for Baker to provide leadership.
But Baker lacks the "product" vision (Firefox had to come from other people as a hobby project, even FirefoxOS started out that way), is more interested in pet projects and dominating them. E.g. the way the CoC was handled; I am not saying a CoC in itself is bad, but the way it was handled and communicated caused major rifts between the leadership and the volunteers, leading to a lot of especially the most experienced "valuable" volunteers shrugging and resigning and changing focus to other projects.
The Eich (and gerv) situation - which wasn't helped by Baker, to say it politely - furthermore created a talent vacuum at the top of the Corporation, and eventually was "resolved" by filing it with unsuited candidates - specifically Baker's yes-man Chris Beard, who was too much of a marketing guy and figurehead to be an effective leader in the CEO role. (I am not commenting on, analyzing or defending Eich's reasons for donating to Prop 8, which made same-sex marriages illegal in California until it was reversed by a court later)
Since the ousting of Eich, and even a little before that, it appears to me, the culture turned from a more or less productive "togetherness" (with it's share of clashes, of course) to an outright cold war between the Baker camp and many of the actual tech staff (and few remaining tech-centered managers). A lot of very good, very idealistic "true believer" people lost their faith and took the golden parachute to the FAANGS, something I would have never expected from a lot of them a few years earlier. Of course, priorities and opinions shift over the course of a life, and not everybody who left did so because of the situation at mozilla - some surely did to seek new challenges or advance their career - but it's still staggering to see the exodus of long-time believers, employees and volunteers alike, over the least 5 or so years.
I remember sitting in the audience of the 2013 mozilla summit (Eich hadn't left mozilla yet, of course) and seeing the constant stream of the leadership talk about "changing the world", "1 million mozillians", proclaiming how "FirefoxOS and BrowserID" will empower users, and all that moonshooting marketing stuff. I distinctly remember the negative impression Baker and Pete Scanlon left me with. And I remember the extreme overuse of the word "Awesome". I remember looking left and right to my fellow (mostly volunteer) pals, looking as confused as me, and that one Baker-friend (forgot her name) sitting rather close to us in the audience, constantly whooing and howling in approval. I remember talking to a lot of (new to me) people from all things mozilla during the summit, and most everybody was as confused as me, and far from being as excited and optimistic as the leadership had been, and very skeptical about the use of resources and leadership priorities. It was not my first big mozilla event, but it was the first one which had a Kafkaesque "corporate" "management decided" feel to it, instead of a community networking event of a diverse community working towards a common goal.
Netscape may be. Mozilla is the child of some influential hacking community that spun off, back in the early 2000s that then found a lifeline in Google ad money. Since that phase passed, they've still siphoning off those laurels for the next two decades.
I worked for Red Hat in 1999 and am pretty aware of the landscape of the early Internet and software, but always up for some corrections - my billionaires comment was a bit tongue in cheek, I'm not sure the early Mozillans are actually billionaires.
> We recognize that our tech writing staff drive a great deal of value to MDN users, as do partner contributions to the content. So we are working on a plan to keep the content up to date.
So fucking work out that plan before this announcement. Corporate culture makes me wanna vomit.
That's not really feasible. For very obvious reasons you can't tell every employee in a company "we're going to have to fire loads of you in a couple of months; please work out a plan to deal with that".
A pretty familiar HN trope is calling in the Tech Billionaire Ex Machina to solve the world's problems. Most of the time this feels like myopic hero-worship ("why doesn't Zuck just fix free speech?"). In this case, though, that would actually be _relevant_. Individuals or businesses with excess wealth that build value using the web would be well justified in working with MDN to ensure these docs stay alive and fresh.
> A pretty familiar HN trope is calling in the Tech Billionaire Ex Machina to solve the world's problems
Love how you creatively defined this concept. This is a recurring pattern i´ve seen particularly in tech, and its not just over billionaires..
In psychoanalysis theres this great lacanian concept of "Big Other".
Once i understood this concept better, its much easier to spot my own flaws on counting on the Big Other (that is actually some illusory tendency of our minds to give us some comfort and help us to cope with the brutal reality).
You can see a great fictional tale about this concept embodied in "The Wizard of Oz".
Once we understand that the big other we were always counting on is in fact pretty much "smoke and mirrors", and that the big other (unlike in the wizard tale) doesnt really care, its a sour wake up call, but one that makes you grow up a little.
And if you not only believe in Big Others, but also assume they have a good willing nature, especially the ones that followed a road paved with gold, i have a bridge to sell to you..
