Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

quirksmode.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 245 posts

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

#111

Post by hansjorg »

nwsm wrote: post #76
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…

>degenerate activism What's this in reference to, specifically?

It seems that it's become completely normal to dehumanize people amongst people on the US right.

It's become so normal that every other thread here will refer to "degenerates" or similar terrible terms for political opponents, and sadly the moderators seem to think this is normal as well.

If you're slightly to the left of Hitler and live in the US, you should arm yourself now, before it's too late.

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

#112

Post by marcinzm »

munk-a wrote: post #103
marcinzm wrote: post #100

>But will we be well served by that in the long run? Mozilla brought in $3.25 BILLION in revenue over the last 10 years. If they'd saved/invested a majority of it then they could go for decades without any further revenue. The business model was sound if they didn't decide to waste money.

Wasn't their business model mostly "We hope that Google keeps subsidizing us for no apparent reason?"

And it worked amazingly well given that they've received over $3 billion from Google. Had they then used that money to plan for the gift horse dying it would have worked out for decades more. But the people overseeing it wanted to build an empire rather than a sustainable foundation.

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

#113

Post by bccdee »

> I Love MDN hinges on the expectation on the part of web developers that this sort of information ought to come for free — the expectation we’re entitled to this sort of free ride.

I think people should be entitled to a free ride.

Important infrastructure can, paradoxically, be both free and expensive. We've committed, for instance, to spending a whole lot of money on maintaining all of our roads, but access to the street is still free for everyday pedestrians.

Not everyone can afford to pay to use the road. If you want to get a job, often you'll need to drive to and from work for a good while before you'll have enough cash built up to meaningfully contribute to the road through your taxes. Of course, wealthy people wind up paying more, but often times they wouldn't have ever become wealthy if roads hadn't originally been available to them for free. Important infrastructure can be free for individuals when our society makes a commitment to collectively paying for it.

MDN is an extremely important resource to beginner devs -- the exact people who would have trouble paying to support it. But supporting beginner devs is good for both the industry and the economy. Important public or open-source infrastructure such as MDN and Wikipedia should receive public grant money. We already do this with research grants for science, because there's a strong understanding that making research available for free makes society better. Informational infrastructure deserves the same consideration.

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

#114

Post by Macha »

avolcano wrote: post #43
cannedslime wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually the provider of a system or a standard also provides the documentation. Should my employer also pay to keep MSDN c# docs up to date? Or should that be the task of microsoft employees?

Microsoft gates plenty of training content behind Visual Studio subscriptions. Also, who is the "provider" of the web platform?

WHATWG? The group of browser vendors that agree on web standards. I think the onus is on the person proposing a web technology to document it.

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

#115

Post by manquer »

Goronmon wrote: post #91
MattGaiser wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do I donate my dollar with that goal in mind? As my goals are not really aligned with Mozilla as a whole. Seems like you want control over the project, not to just be donating? At that point it appears one of your main solution would be to start a project like MDN that you can have such control over.

OP is not saying he wants decide how Firefox and MDN are run per se, He is saying we want to not be funding projects like pocket. We don't want or know how to run MDN or firefox, but we are grateful users who would like those to succeed and willing to contribute those projects specifically.

The concern of about management salary is very important in Mozilla important than in a for profit entity.

Shareholders / board will react fast enough over market challenges or poor performance in for profit companies . Many, many companies have cut base salaries for management this year due look at Airbnb for example, All Mozilla is saying variable pay will be impacted.

Given the ownership and revenue structure of Mozilla nobody is in a position to keep management of Mozilla Corporation accountable, the donors to Mozilla Foundation donate miniscule amounts compared to what the Corporation makes in the single search deal with Google to have any real leverage.

The deal with Google just got renewed well before the lay-off's, despite the empty words about global pandemic being a reason, there is no major impact on their revenue ( or Google's for that matter).

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

#116

Post by austincheney »

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…

> Of course, these same people have no idea what it actually takes to run a charity; they have no idea what on-the-ground problems need to be solved day-to-day; they have absolutely zero understanding of the organizational supports needed to make any organization function. They're basically in the worst possible position to decide how best to use those funds.

Sounds like a democracy except funding isn’t voluntary.

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

#117

Post by tdeck »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #101
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…

"degenerate activism" -- really? You could have just stopped with the other two.

It's odd to see people unselfconsciously use the term "degenerate" these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art

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

#118

Post by bccdee »

outime wrote: post #94
CarelessExpert wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd donate to a cause if my money doesn't go towards political alignments of any kind. That's... well, naive, I guess? Every single NGO picks an issue, and that issue has a political angle to it. Not only do I think it's unreasonable to expect an NGO to be apolitical, I think it's flat out impossible. I would ask you: Do you really want NGOs to be apolitical? Or do you want them to share your political alignment, a…

There are NGOs that don't take public stances, you just have to look out for them (depends on your country as well I guess?). It's fine if you want to accept everyone is corrupt and will have hidden causes ("that's naive") but I don't and other people share this. >Or do you want them to share your political alignment, and in that way be non-controversial? Please stop these kind of assumptions - it just feels childish…

> I don't want political stances of any kind from an organization that's getting my money to make a specific thing better.

Your notion of what "better" means is in and of itself a political stance.

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

#119

Post by agentultra »

I feel like this also speaks to the wider trend in OSS. Businesses in many (the majority of?) and their programmers have come to expect free compilers, developer tools, libraries, security patches... and documentation and all that entails.

"Open source," projects that are well funded appear "free," which seems to distort perceptions and opinions.

Maintaining good documentation, like maintaining libraries, and good compilers takes a lot of on going effort. This creates value and deserves compensation.

If not corporate sponsors, if not a patreon style model, what else can we do? Does everyone on the web contribute a little bit through volume collective licensing when you buy a domain or host a server or from profits of commercial entities on the web platform?

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

#120

Post by Communitivity »

I'd pay $50/year to keep MDN afloat and current, though would prefer $24 ($2 per month). I think Patreon is an excellent idea.

Perhaps a combination: Patreon for continuous funding and development; kickstarter for specific big features/releases (e.g., resurrecting Places and implementing it in Servo).

Also, has anyone archived MDN, in case they pull the plug on it unexpectedly now the team is gone?

Post reply on HN