Sure, put up another barrier for those trying to learn web development.
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.
- Sponsor for $ a month: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/
- Buy Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/
My build on this: Mozilla, send out a poll and see if this is something people would thrown down $$$ for.
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)
- Sponsor for $ a month: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/
- Buy Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Competent organizations would pay for this in bulk.
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.
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.
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?
There's no need to lockout the poor teenagers who are wanting to explore web tech for themselves.
- 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.
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]
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.
Love MDN, it's absolutely been some of the most valuable documentation I've been privileged to have access to during my career.
Skip to the point and set up a patron , as a node dev I would not able to do my job without MDN.
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
god, I _wish_
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s it, it’s time to not play nice anymore.
> 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.
Charge. Money. For. MDN.
And pay the tech writers.
[1] https://kapeli.com/dash
Edit: wording correction.