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Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

At first glance, this feels a little distasteful. I've always thought of the MDN docs like Wikipedia; a non-profit public resource. Attempting to monetize it feels... wrong somehow.

So long as the docs themselves remain under CC-BY-SA though guess it's not really a problem. The premium features they currently offer seem reasonable, and if things ever get too out of hand the community could always just move to another site. It also doesn't sound like something I'd pay for though, so not sure how successful it'll be.

On the positive side, more funding to maintain MDN could turn out to be a good thing in the long term. I guess we'll have to see.

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I don't really understand how offering better content against money is worse than asking for money regularly like Wikipedia does (especially when they seem to just consume more and more money).

This feels more like a service rather than it being a subscription-based donation. It's not called Wikipedia Plus.

If it's to pay technical writers I don't see the problem. Wikipedia on the other hand ask for donations that seems absorbed by some kind of administrative black hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim...

Self Wiking Ice Cweam Cone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licking_ice_cream_cone

Thanks, I didn't know the phenomenon had a name.

A paywall shuts out financially disadvantaged groups and limits the circulation of knowledge. Donations don’t, however annoying the banners are.

Whether overly abundant donations are misallocated is a completely orthogonal issue.

Note that I’m not saying we are entitled to anything; but slapping the MDN brand on a premium subscription service does tarnish the original brand a little.

But as far as I understand the source article, MDN Plus is not a paywall to the type of content that is already on MDN. What's going to be behind a paywall are a kind of technical essays which are not currently on MDN and some convenience features.

Is my understanding incorrect?

That’s why I’m mainly taking issue with slapping the MDN brand over the seemingly not terribly related information service.

On the other hand a paywall may mean that people writing content are the one that gets the money, which creates an healthier ecosystem that doesn't depend on donation of money or time (as opposed to wikipedia).

Wikipedia misallocating funds does tarnish the original brand a lot, especially when most people that contribute content are doing it for free.

> Wikipedia misallocating funds does tarnish the original brand a lot

Which has nothing to do the donation model.

Wikimedia can pay full time content writers if they want to.

Mozilla can also use the subscription income to pay CEO comp if they want to.

Allocation of funds has close to nothing to do with the acquisition of funds, unless the acquisition comes with a specific mandate, which neither Wikipedia donations nor the subscription service here has.

You're right, I wrongly assumed that MDN Plus money would stay on MDN Plus or at leasat MDN, but they said nothing of the sort.

Having a paid option disincentives improvement of the non-paid option.

As long as they're not using the donation money to fund the paid option (which, to be fair, Mozilla has an history of doing), I don't see how.

That's assuming that revenue from MDN plus will go only to fund more premium content.

I don't think that is true (maybe I missed something from their page?), which means they will always have the incentive to make more premium content in order to generate more revenue, especially if they need it to cover the expenses.

You're right, this is a assumption I made that may be wrong, and in that case my arguments don't hold.

Because there are tons of people who cannot pay for services like this (lower class, students, third-world countries, etc), and learning how to build and deploy technology is powerful leverage to improving their quality of life.

I mean it's not like web development tutorials and blogs haven't filled the internet with free content for years to learn everything you could possibly want. freecodecamp will take you from nothing to hirable, for free.

There's much more to technology than websites. Those people have more important issues to worry about than access to MDN and they're not the responsibility of Mozilla either.

I think this is the right step to take for things like this. There are massive corporations with cash galore that use open source and publicly available resources and rarely give anything back. With MDN Plus, there's a chance now that devs at these companies will get their company to pay the subscription. We need more programs like this.

> Attempting to monetize it feels... wrong

On a long enough timeline, all free and libre services done out of the good will and charitable efforts of contributors and maintainers, will eventually succumb to some sort of monetization strategy. I know in my case, and last time I checked, I don't work for free.

yeah a bit the same but if they need money to keep valuable operations like MDN going then making a way to get some cash this way doesn't bother me more than that

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