An Update on MDN Web Docs

> Is it valuable enough that you'd consider paying for access?

I'd argue that people would pay for MDN. I know I would pay a small fee for so high-quality straight forward information on web APIs.

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."

> It may be valuable as a public good, but what's the ROI for Mozilla?

Isn't it the whooooole point of Mozilla that it creates public good for the internet?

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.

> Is it valuable enough that you'd consider paying for access?

Yes

I surely would pay, as long as it's not behind a paywall. Much like with Wikipedia.

The value of MDN is very much in its being a public good.

> Is it valuable enough that you'd consider paying for access?

I would definitely use huge part of my training budgets for this if that would be an option.

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.

Seems reasonable to host this on https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs

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).

What else would the funds go to that you're worried about?

Exactly this has been attempted for a limited time in 2018, https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/a-new-way-to-support-mdn/, and pretty much nobody actually paid.

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.

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.

Its: as I understand it that's it's now just two engineers and one tech writer.

That is also true for any non-profit you donate for. The Cancer non-profit, the Xyz decease non-profit.

That is not strange. Non-profits require good leadership - and that comes with a salary.

There's a discussion up the page.

Antitrust laws might.

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

As the owner of web.dev we're absolutely not doing that. We're working with Mozilla and the PAB right now on what's need to support the future of MDN.

A defunded part of the organization "working on a plan". Does not sound super promising.

Incidentally, I bet a lot of us would pay to have w3schools taken down

> Taking it down would leave us with w3schools

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.

[1] - https://caniuse.com/

[2] - https://www.quirksmode.org/

You could probably donate to Mozilla Foundation and earmark it for MDN today.

I just found out that you _can_ directly pay for MDN:

- Sponsor for $ a month: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/

- Buy Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/

There is also the open source https://devdocs.io/

> 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?

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)

There are two existing ways to pay for MDN, that are so well hidden that I only just found out about them:

- Sponsor for $ a month: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/

- Buy Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

Here is a longer explanation by the person who created the precursor to MDN: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/i_love_mdn_...

Here is the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24159244

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.

Bonus points for linking to jwz from hacker news!

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

Please note that this link's content was apparently replaced with offensive imagery.

Great read, but who knows how much of this story is true

How is Mozilla financially autonomous from Google?

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.

Why is that an assumption you think would happen?

They rarely are, but Mozilla is very much the child of tech billionaires, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask for some help :)