Mozilla prepares to launch MDN Plus in March 2022
soeren-hentzschel.at
soeren-hentzschel.at
I hope I am not the lone positive voice in the thread - it does seem no company gets quite the same level of criticism as Mozilla on HN
They knew they weren't good at executing on something, so they partnered with a company with a proven track record, and leveraged their brand to make sure both Mozilla and their partner got value.
It's a very successful business model, and has been used everywhere (entertainment is a great example, most IP owners license the creation of content outside of their immediate domain to other developers - toy manufacturers, video game studios, comic book and board games companies, etc).
In a world where the relevance of Firefox is waning, investing in a brand where user centricity, privacy, and security are key, and maintaining high standards on licensees is a winning strategy, especially if Mozilla owns the customer relationships.
That said, 3 million USD/year is a ridiculous wage for a non-profit (even if its a for-profit-in-non-profit construction). There's no function in the world which warrants such a wage.
That's what happens when you go around with a holier-than-thou attitude: they set high standars for the industry when they themselves fail to meet those standards every time.
My issues with Mozilla's leadership team were never about the vision, mostly about the execution. I don't like Brendan Eich's politics, or the cryptocurrency and borderline shakedown approach that he used to build and launch Brave, but the goal of keeping competition alive on the web? I could get behind that.
I don't like the recurring fallback to Google search revenue by the Mozilla leadership team, but it's kept Mozilla around to keep fighting the fight, and give the opportunity to find other options to keep fighting for their principles (which are not wokeness and leftism, despite what folks would have you believe - https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ )
Choosing a hill to die on doesn't make you virtuous, it just makes you dead. Mozilla is alive and seems to be trying to move forward, and I hope they succeed.
Perhaps, but Mozilla is also the company most centered at the intersection "mission we like and wish the company succeeded at" and "management doing stupid shit one after another"....
Now there will come those saying that since it’s not a government, it can’t be corruption, they can go ans screw themselves in advance.
It's good that Mozilla is trying to diversify its income streams, it's a bit worrying when they are so dependent on Google.
In an underperforming company, executives have no grounds for rewards or raises. In a still-healthy company, they would likely have been replaced.
Mozilla and Firefox developers are still actively engaged in web standards, and are still punching above their weight in terms of building a web browser with a small team, and narrow revenue streams.
I don't necessarily agree that Mozilla has the right leadership, but how do you expect that leadership to change constructively if the pay isn't competitive with other tech companies of similar size and scale (1/2 Billion in revenue, and hundreds of millions of users)?
People here literally accuse Facebook of being a global Orwellian totalitarian superstate that engages in genocide and MK-ULTRA style mind-control, but OK.
Sorry to be so negative, but as a long-time Firefox fan, I despair at the disparity between the funding for the Firefox team vs the executive team
source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/endangered-firefox-the-state-o...
[0] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-2020-fo... Page 7 (9 in the PDF)
Back when I was managing one of the security teams at Mozilla there was an attempt to build out some revenue diversification options, and one of the areas I was involved with was developer services, basically offering paid, hosted versions of the open source tools we were already building and using (web compat, security and testing services, etc) that could be used by developers. It never got off the ground, and the lack of traction was one of the reasons I left; I view my failure to succeed in my attempts there as one my biggest professional let downs :(
I want to think that it sounds like some of Mozilla's leadership has finally gotten out of the way of the folks that are doing awesome work, and it makes me hopeful for the future of the project and the Mozilla mission.
Congrats to the teams behind these services!
Free MDN isn't going away.
MDN Plus is a premium content service that will offer deep dives into technical topics. The service was tested over the summer.
Additional announced features include bookmarking across all of MDN, commenting, offline browsing, and themes.
Price: USD10/month or USD100/year.
Time frame: March 2022
Having a big paying community will drive more free content, as both the paying and free customers benefit from it.
If free content start sucking, less people sign up.
Plus, some content just isn't worth privatizing, like documentation.
Since it's open source obviously someone is going to chime in that I should spend my time removing these stupid UI elements...
Open source software requires that developers have the ability to spend time to contribute code. People need to get paid so they can support themselves, and as they get older, their families.
There are very few successful open source models, basically: * advertising * professional services related to the OSS offering * enterprise licensing * direct user support and contribution
Anything that is not one of these four models is either a student or hobby project, or is subsidized by the businesses that are paying the developers to contribute (either explicitly by hiring folks that work on the projects, or by employing and assigning people to work on features that eventually make their way back into the ecosystem).
If you don't support people getting paid to contribute to open source software, you are ceding the role of OSS developers to people in privileged positions, or demanding that they be paupers.
And in the interest of keeping the conversation non confrontational, folks suggesting patches shouldn't remove the UI elements from the code, they should provide a UI toggle to disable the nags; choosing to support the software or not, financially speaking, is an option for users, but be very explicit if the user chooses not to support it :)
Very lackluster
I don't think I would be interested in the content that much (unless they go way beyond the usual FE articles), but I'll happily pay $100 a year in support of MDN/Firefox.
Even though I don't use Firefox it has an important role imo. I use MDN almost daily and I get lots of value out of it. I fully support them trying out new revenue streams.
I'm not particularly impressed. Does anyone really want to pay for the modern version of Linda.com, when we're swamped with free tutorials and blogs already...?
There is no such thing. There is the W3C, an international standards consortium that has published standards relating to the WWW, and there is W3Schools (no “C”), who seemingly picked the name to confuse people into thinking they were somehow a part of the W3C, which they frequently succeed at. The two organisations are not associated with each other in any way.
It was awful when they let go the Rust and Cranelift engineers.
Reminds me of Oracle - where the lawyers and MBAs have just seized control.