This is probably somewhat outside of the scope of the Core Infrastructure Initiative [1], but maybe that just means we need an organization of a similar nature for projects like this?
I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action
141–150 of 245 posts
Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action
#142I'd happily pay a yearly fee to continue employing technical writers, engineers, and anyone else needed to keep MDN the reliable, source-of-truth, ad-free resource that it is today.
Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action
#143Developers and Employers who are not ready to pay for these sites like MDN are part of the problem. No Argument here.
Would you care to argument your case anyway? Your statement seems very black & white. Not every developer has cash to spare, especially those just starting out who might need resources like this the most. Same goes for companies that are just getting started.
Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action
#144> You’re part of the problem, not the solution.
I hate this faulty line of reasoning. It's a false dichotomy. You cannot simultaneously be either part of all the world's problems and/or solutions.
Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No, not really. If I want to donate to achieve a specific technical goal (e.g. documentation about something completely apolitical) and nothing else that's not a political stance.
Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action
#146I think there may be interesting alternatives. If you want everyone to pay their share then you're basically proposing a paywalled site. But is it necessary? A much smaller community with some combination of volunteers and funding could make a site for everyone. (One person is too small, obviously, since they'll burn out.)
But I do think this article hits on something important, which is the difference between activism devoted towards demanding things of others, versus activism devoted to creating an organization to actually do some work.
It seems like it would be quite possible (though there is a lot of work involved) for someone to create an independent organization that just works on MDN? You don't anyone else's permission. There are various volunteer groups that decide to fix various things on Wikipedia, without having any intention of running Wikipedia.
But someone needs to lead. Who will bell the cat? [1]
Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I was wondering about this, what else do they do than just go to Google and sell the search spot?
Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
It need not take such high salaried non-technical CEO, degenerate activism or doomed web startups to run something like Mozilla.
But it does take a high salaried non-technical CEO to market the idea to more people, which brings in more funding for the project. That's the thing. $50 / month from you or me means nothing compared to $5 / month from a 100x larger audience. Growing the audience means marketing, and tons of non-technical work. A lot of charities become marketing firms to bring in more money. Because that's how you effectively grow a…
> But it does take a high salaried non-technical CEO to market the idea to more people, which brings in more funding for the project.
That's the same argument used to pay CEOs hundreds of millions ("they make us more money"). And then there are studies suggesting that the effect the CEO has on the success of the company is rather small - and of course, the CEOs who aren't successful still get paid unbelievable amounts of money.
Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action
#149I wonder how many web developers in this thread, many who are quite certain how things should be run, have ever actually contributed articles to MDN... Everyone is an armchair director, very few actually contribute to such projects.
I would bet that most people on this thread have answered few stack overflow questions freely. Plenty of people contribute to Wikipedia , If I see simple mistakes in a project wiki or readme people submit the pull request because github makes it easy to do.
It is matter of UX and openness towards contribution. MDN never felt like it needed my contribution, not once I thought that a) I could actually add value b) my contributions were welcome. Until a couple of days back I and many others did not know even that MDN took wiki style contributions.
Re: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
>degenerate activism What's this in reference to, specifically?
Bigoted dog whistle borrowed from literal Nazis. Edit: interesting that there are so many downvotes. Consider yourself lucky that this seems absurd to you, because it's borrowed directly from Nazi "degenerate art" and "degenerate music" and used like this almost exclusively in modern alt-right contexts to mean those falling outside of their ideal (bigoted) worldview.
I used the word "degenerate" myself the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24041589) and assure you it wasn't any kind of dog whistle.
Obviously the GP should have ommitted that flamebait (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24160738), but a comment like yours also breaks the site guidelines—specifically this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Going straight to Nazis is one habit that rule is intended to check. It leads to extremely predictable discussion that inevitably gets nasty because that's the only way for it not to be boring (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).