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I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

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Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#61

Post by JaggedJax »

gambler wrote: post #6

>Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat? Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. >Create an independent entity like Fronteers, but then international, get members to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year, and use that money to fund MDN or its s…

It looks like MDN has its own donation option separate from the Mozilla Foundation. They are pretty clear that the donations go towards MDN specifically. I suppose if this had been more well known about and supported the team may have survived, but supporting them directly could help grow that again.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/

edit: Looking into this further, I cannot figure out how to actually donate. It looks like they killed this donation program, maybe they should bring it back now.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#62

Post by oliwarner »

I don't think shitting on others' praise for MDN makes anything about this better.

Yes, it's an initiative that needs money. Maybe this will enthuse somebody up high to reconsider, or somebody else to take the torch and run with it.

But even if it doesn't, a bit of recognition is nice. These are humans and even though it doesn't pay the bills, it might help somebody not feel they're as worthless as Mozilla imply.

Stop dumping on these projects because you're all sourpuss about "free". You're only adding to the hurt.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#63

Post by Androider »

freeone3000 wrote: post #15
avolcano wrote: post #4

Rather sad the two proposals here are either "giant browser vendors should pay for it" or "independent web developers should pay for it." It's one thing for developers to pay for things that will develop their independent careers, but MDN is a reference as much as it is a learning resource; it's something developers constantly use at their jobs. Their employers , big or small, should be the ones paying for it. Of cou…

Open source versus closed source is not something a business cares about, but it's something employees care about. The price isn't terribly relevant either, nobody is exactly pinching pennies - my business trip per diem is higher than the donation cost above! But spend has to be justified. There needs to be a paid version with at least one functional change for a business to be able to sponsor it. We can bullshit all…

Yes, companies have no problem paying for tools and resources, just don't call it "supporting open source" or a "donation".

Give everyone free access to MDN for X articles per month, New York Times style. Then sell a MDN Pro subscription with unlimited access and exclusives for $39/mo/user or $399/year. There's tons of examples in the cloud space of this working, like Linux Academy's online training or A Cloud Guru etc. that are making millions per year.

Just for reference, a MSDN subscription is $5,999 the first year and $2,569 for a renewal (but does come with a ton of stuff)... None of this 50-100 dollars per year or you're just setting yourself up for failure from the start.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#64

Post by jakear »

CarelessExpert wrote: post #35
gambler wrote: post #6

>Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat? Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. >Create an independent entity like Fronteers, but then international, get members to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year, and use that money to fund MDN or its s…

> Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. Interestingly, this same sentiment is a huge part of why charitable giving runs into problems. A lot of people are willing to give, so long as they get to decide what is done with their funds. Of course, these same people have no i…

Mozilla isn’t like most charities though, it’s really more of a charity conglomerate, where a bunch of different charities have been banded together under a single donation-processing frontend. So while I’d never request money donated to Mozilla to be specifically used for “Cloud-Hosted GPU VMs for MDN”, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for the conglomerate to be broken up and to be able to donate to only the products you actually use.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#65

Post by MattGaiser »

CarelessExpert wrote: post #35
gambler wrote: post #6

>Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat? Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. >Create an independent entity like Fronteers, but then international, get members to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year, and use that money to fund MDN or its s…

> Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. Interestingly, this same sentiment is a huge part of why charitable giving runs into problems. A lot of people are willing to give, so long as they get to decide what is done with their funds. Of course, these same people have no i…

It is not a matter of expertise, but a matter of setting priorities and valuing projects. I value MDN and Firefox. I am fine with every other aspect of Mozilla dying to save those two.

How do I donate my dollar with that goal in mind? As my goals are not really aligned with Mozilla as a whole.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#66

Post by avasthe »

CarelessExpert wrote: post #55
avasthe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It need not take such high salaried non-technical CEO, degenerate activism or doomed web startups to run something like Mozilla.

No offense intended, but this isn't the way to have a meaningful conversation. First, it's stated as a blind truth with no reasoning. The only thing I can do is say "you're wrong", as there's no basis upon which to have a real discussion. Second, your repeated use of the phrase "degenerate activism" seems to have no other purpose than to elicit a strong emotional response. From my position it's borderline trolling. T…

PS: I am not the person you were replying to in GP. But I used his words. English is not my first language.

1) Look at the CEO salary. She was not even an engineer. The C-level executives don't harm themselves in this process, but there is no improvement because of her and she is still reaping a big salary. This also means many people are disappointed and less donations.

2) degenerate activism: all the SJW / diversity shit that Mozilla is into. I know some people here are going to defend it. But artificially trying to create diversity in an ecosystem means low quality. And a company like Mozilla which can't keep talented engineers doesn't need all this.

3) doomed web startups: Pocket, and their new VPN service which is going to be used by exactly 13 HN users.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#67

Post by ytNumbers »

th0ma5 wrote: post #47
learc83 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>degenerate activism What is degenerate activism?

That's a kind of far right virtue signalling as far as I can tell. In my opinion, it is wild projection, but it seems to try to label any progressive ideal as regression.

That phrase might refer to any kind of activism that degenerates into mob violence.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#68

Post by koolba »

gambler wrote: post #6

>Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat? Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. >Create an independent entity like Fronteers, but then international, get members to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year, and use that money to fund MDN or its s…

I don’t really care much about the CEO salary either. Turning a technical writing project into a political crusade or flushing funds down the toilet of terrible unrelated startup ideas are both much worse than the overhead from an overpaid CEO.

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#69

Post by prepend »

CarelessExpert wrote: post #35
gambler wrote: post #6

>Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat? Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. >Create an independent entity like Fronteers, but then international, get members to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year, and use that money to fund MDN or its s…

> Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. Interestingly, this same sentiment is a huge part of why charitable giving runs into problems. A lot of people are willing to give, so long as they get to decide what is done with their funds. Of course, these same people have no i…

There are tools to help with this. Charity Navigator collects data and evaluates charities. Mozilla looks really bad in that only 80% of funds goes toward mission [1].

There are other metrics, but many use these metrics for understanding how funds are used at charities and applying some governance.

I was surprised Mozilla is so low as many charities strive for 90-95% toward mission so their admin costs are low enough to attract institutional donors.

[1] https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...

Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

#70

Post by marcinzm »

avasthe wrote: post #45
CarelessExpert wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. Interestingly, this same sentiment is a huge part of why charitable giving runs into problems. A lot of people are willing to give, so long as they get to decide what is done with their funds. Of course, these same people have no i…

It need not take such high salaried non-technical CEO, degenerate activism or doomed web startups to run something like Mozilla.

>high salaried non-technical CEO

Competent people who can manage an organization that brings in $500 million in revenue per year aren't going to be cheap.

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