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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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. :(

> after it didn't prove very successful

It doesn't seem like it proved anything. It seems like barely anyone had an idea it existed.

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.

This. I thought I followed Mozilla closely but I never heard about this program until now.

That’s too bad, I wish I knew about it while it was still active.

Have you found a way to donate? All the links on that page are dead for me.

I have not. Apparently it was a limited time run. :(

https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ ..? I put a note that I’m donating because of X when I do.

I had no idea that this existed, and I use MDN almost every day.

Because nobody knew about it. I was never aware of this and 2018 was my most active year of web development.

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

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.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/

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.

If we look at IRL, governments pay for infrastructure from taxes charged on citizens on non-voluntary basis.

Maybe Mozilla Foundation is one of those infrastructures inherently unprofitable, unattractive, not price competent on individual level?

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.

The EU likes privacy, most states already have weird public tv taxes and such.

In spain you used to pay a canon/fee for every disk, hdd, or pendrive that can contain pirateed content, it's like a preemptive tax for everyone.

lol...

(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.

I don't see how that could be true given that they continue to roll out features to Firefox.

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.

Last I saw the numbers, donations tally up to ~$10 million, and the search engine deal to ~$500 million.

So I'm not sure what practical purpose you are aiming at.

The Foundation doesn't cover the payroll for the engineers working on Firefox?

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.

My impression from the layoffs thread from a couple weeks ago is that the Foundation does not employ engineers working on Firefox.

I dont think its fair to downvote you for asking a question. But no it does not seem to be the case.

You're very much on to something I think.

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.

You can see it here and some of the really good answers imo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24171030

Looking at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/, e.g. the "Combating Misinformation" is not something that I'd consider one of the core tasks of Mozilla.

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).

It's fine to think like this, but it's not fine to use donations for it if those donations were not made for that cause.

This is why people don't donate to mozilla.

Golly.

It is there in their annual report. In part it is what you are donating for. In a way it is MDN's mission

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).

You can donate to the Foundation, but you can only purchase products from the Corporation: Mozilla VPN (https://vpn.mozilla.org/), Pocket Premium (https://getpocket.com/premium), and Firefox Private Network (https://fpn.firefox.com/). You can't donate to the Corporation.

Management salaries.

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

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

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

> 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.

I mean, if you're allowed to make donations with your training budget, you kinda can

In my limited experience donations are more complicated to justify to your managers

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.

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

What if we could all pay an optional $5 / year for dedicated staff?

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.

It is indispensable to web developers.

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.

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