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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

#181

Post by triceratops »

gowld wrote: post #160
bccdee wrote: post #113

> 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 No it's not. It's governed by free motor vehicle law. Pedestrians are often punished by law for walking in the street.

Sidewalks are also part of "the street".

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

#183

Post by michaelmrose »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #130
MattGaiser wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't require that level of control. I just want something similar to a restricted university donation fund. Another faculty at my alma mater had a mega donation a few years ago that was restricted to paying for new research chairs in business. They couldn't use it for anything in other faculties. They couldn't reallocate it to recruiting. I want something like that.

Well, that's your answer then: promise a sufficiently life-changing donation for Mozilla such that they're willing to negotiate with you.

This is actually a good idea and could be done collectively as well as individually.

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

#184

Post by [deleted] »

jermier wrote: post #92
aazaa wrote: post #86

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention W3Schools, because that's another model that has existed in parallel with, and may actually predate MDN. It has incredible Google juice, seems to be as resilient as an army of cockroaches, and is about as pretty. Still, it's another path this could take.

https://www.w3fools.com/

[deleted]

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

#185

Post by cmiles74 »

CarelessExpert wrote: post #180
cmiles74 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, this is both unfair and simplistic. It implies that people will only donate to a charity if they have control over where the money is spent. I disagree with this vehemently; those who give likely do not want to micro-manage the funds. Rather, they want to ensure that it forwards the goals of the charity and is not spent on unreasonably large executive compensation payrolls or expensive private jet flig…

> In my opinion, this is both unfair and simplistic. It implies that people will only donate to a charity if they have control over where the money is spent. To be clear, I didn't meant to imply everyone does this. I'm just saying that many people do, and it's challenging for charities. It's one of the reasons I find charities provide options to direct giving to specific efforts, as it offers the donor some measure o…

Fair enough, you are correct. I misread the article in my haste to find a citation. That was my mistake, it certainly made my point more compelling.

I updated the comment with the correction.

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

#186

Post by zerocrates »

prepend wrote: post #69
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…

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…

Charity Navigator information is tricky with Mozilla since it's only dealing with the Foundation, a pile of just $20 million in revenue in the last year they're covering there (closer to $30 million for the most recent available year), less than half of which was donations ("Licensing Royalties" is where the majority of the other revenue comes from... it looks like the Corporation pays the Foundation to license the Firefox trademarks and things like that, and that's basically half the Foundation's income).

The Corporation, though it's a subsidiary, takes in several hundred million a year, the lion's share being from revenue for selecting Firefox's default search engine.

Note that despite CEO Mitchell Baker's couple-million salary which has been much-bandied-about lately, Charity Navigator lists the top compensated director as Mark Surman at ~$200K. Baker runs the Corporation and chairs the board of the Foundation, but is paid only by the Corporation. The realities of Mozilla's existence don't really map cleanly to what gets reported on a Form 990 and shown by Charity Navigator.

So it's a little tough to get an accurate view of Mozilla's finances through Charity Navigator's usual information: there's lots of room for things to kind of shift around: for the Corporation to pay the Foundation for things and vice-versa.

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

#187

Post by 627467 »

seabrookmx wrote: post #41
627467 wrote: post #5

In my head the question is: can a wikipedia-style MDN exist? If the answer is yes than I think op opinion is only on one type of model of organizing and funding a documentation site. Will a wikipedia-style MDN be successful if there are (in addition of volunteers) paid writers who cover the majority of the work need? Maybe not. Maybe that's what the existing MDN proves.

It already is a wiki. You can contribute right now if you wanted..

Wikipedia model goes beyond being a wiki. Wikipedia does not pay for content on itself. So they have no direct vested interest in the content.

That is not the model of MDN, it seems.

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

#188

Post by zdragnar »

gowld wrote: post #168
wolco wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a responsibility to safeguard your donation to further your personal charity goals. In this day and age charities can't expect blank cheque donations without specific goals and targets they are personally aligned to. The project gives up some control when they accept donations.

That's a far higher bar than we safeguard the rest of our consumer spending. At the end of the day it just sounds like excuse-making to not pay for free stuff.

If I purchase a product, I am satisfied that my money was an exchange for the product and will be used as the company sees fit. If I don't like how they use their money, I won't buy their products.

If I donate to an organization, I do so because I believe in at minimum a particular aspect of its operations. If I can't get, in return, some assurance that the money will go towards that aspect, I won't donate to them.

To me, the bar for either is essentially the same.

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

#189

Post by notyourday »

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…

> 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 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.

It's a reverse. All donors of charities that aren't casual dilettantes know that the charities are teats to suck on by the fabulous people running them. That's why such donors use "Restricted funds"

https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/understa...

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

#190

Post by crocodiletears »

hansjorg wrote: post #164
dang wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24160874 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You routinely seem to allow (as in it not even warranting a comment) straight up dehumanizing language from many participants in here. I realize this kind of behaviour has been normalized by the president over the last four years, but I thought HN was better than this.

Degenerate's in increasingly common use. I can't speak to the parent's use of the term, indeed from the context of their statement, there's good reasons to be suspicious of their intent. However, my social circle uses it quite heavily to refer to things like people who consider pet ownership equivalent to parenting, neonazis, and karens who fabricate sleights against themselves in order to haggle prices at retail outlets.

Despite its distasteful origins, it's becoming a catch-all for self-aggrandizing anti-social behavior, and destructively anti-normative sentiments.

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