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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

#191

Post by shirakawasuna »

dang wrote: post #150
shirakawasuna wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What was OP referring to re: Mozilla?

In-context, it's clear what degenerate meant.

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

#192

Post by shirakawasuna »

zo1 wrote: post #158
shirakawasuna wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's quite a stretch, even though it has historic tie points. Right now on the right, it's used to refer to behavior and culture that is really abhorrent. That's at least my take on it, and how I use the term personally. 99% of the time the usage of the term is definitely not about race and eugenics which is what you're implying with the Nazi reference. I leave 1% because I don't preclude possibility of the rare ex…

They're referring to Mozilla and "degenerate activism"...

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

#193

Post by fefe23 »

Whatever are you talking about? Cult of the free? Are you kidding me?

I did pay for MDN. Google monetized my personal data and gave some of that money to Mozilla.

I paid for MDN. Not with money, but same difference. Mozilla got money.

Now if you want to complain about Mozilla not spending that money on MDN but relying on crowdsourcing, then be my guest. I don't have enough insight into who go paid what at Mozilla to comment on that.

But please stop the "cult of the free" b/s. Just because there is no paywall in front of it does not mean it wasn't paid for.

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

#194

Post by notriddle »

MattGaiser wrote: post #65
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 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.

> 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.

This is a terrible sentiment, even if the only thing you actually care about are those two products.

As long as most people use Firefox to access websites run by Google, Mozilla is screwed. Google uses both overt and covert methods to drive Firefox users to switch to Chrome. For Mozilla to maintain the Firefox userbase, they have to get them to browse other websites.

Pocket is an obvious attempt at that, by providing a time-sucking website that works great in Firefox, isn't run by Google, and is relatively cheap to run (read: it's not video).

What surprises me is that Facebook wasn't advertising Firefox. I know that sounds stupid, but back when Google+ was a thing, Facebook was stuck competing with a vertically-integrated solution from the browser (Chrome) all the way to the social network (Google+). That seems like a terrible situation to be in, and Chrome's only worthwhile competition on Windows at the time would have been Firefox.

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

#195

Post by mook »

gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #126
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.

Thunderbird is pretty useful as well. Actually I would pay for Thunderbird if I was asked to.

As far as I can tell, https://give.thunderbird.net/ actually goes to the organization in charge of maintaining the software. It's not tax deductible or anything, but nor does it (appear to) go to other uses like advocacy. I would recommend looking closer for yourself first if you want to send them money.

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

#196

Post by prepend »

zerocrates wrote: post #186
prepend wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 F…

Charity navigator has many weaknesses, but I still find it helpful. Especially with situations where there are shells or special structures. I wish they would cover stuff like the corporation. But I would never donate to an org with stats like Mozilla.

Both from bad governance perspective, and doubly so because the board knows how this appears and doesn’t care. I expect because they have stable donations and don’t rely on “retail donors” who need to use these cheap due diligence tools.

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

#197

Post by piefayth »

Timberwolf wrote: post #23

One thing which really resonated: "But will you do the boring but necessary browser testing to figure out if what you’re describing is always true, or just most of the time? And will you repeat that testing once new versions have come out? Will you go through related pages..." This. A thousand times this. The problem for me isn't the quantity of information any more, it's the quality. 10-15 years ago if you hit an ev…

This is tangential to your point, but it’s funny how sometimes the amount of information on a topic can ultimately be a detriment due to the dilution of truth over time.

I’ve been spending my free time working with an experimental library. Google stops returning relevant results for searches on this topic around the 10th result. While this is often infuriating and leads to countless hours deep in indecipherable library code, it is equally likely to stumble upon an in depth discussion among users about pros and cons of various solutions. This context is rarely captured for mainstream tools, and when it is, those authors are lauded for their ability to contextualize the problem.

What is most disappointing to me is how often we document “what” but not “why” when most of us NEED the context of “why” to make comparisons across different tools or approaches for our use cases.

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

#198

Post by paulirish »

speedgoose wrote: post #85
billyhoffman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look in the footer. It’s a Creative Commons Attribution license for all web.dev content and Apache 2 for all the code samples. I’m really not sure what else you would ask for here

My bad, the code is also on Github. However it's far from a wiki and the process looks boring and cumbersome: https://web.dev/handbook/quick-start/

FWIW, here's a typical edit to an existing article: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web.dev/pull/3678

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

#200

Post by lsiebert »

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…

Not sure why government isn't a possible solution too.
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