41–50 of 322 posts
What a cash grab Firefox devs should quit this sinking ship ASAP, fork the browser and setup some sort of developer funds like blender/krita/gimp/godot and many other I'll be happy to donate directly to the firefox team without having to go through this mafia
Treat this as an annual donation and don’t use the features. Seems like an easy solution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a “what about … “ response. The only important thing is if they are going to invest in new staff in the future. The old staff almost certainly have new jobs in new companies. Let’s not move the goal posts. Having reason to invest in enhancing documentation, and creating a viable revenue stream by doing so is a good thing, even if decisions in the past are regrettable.
No the "we'll pay for it!" comments were in the context of the staff being let go and departments spun down. We meant, we'll pay to keep this high quality content going. No one said, sure yeah fire all those folks, flail around for a year, convince people to just give free content for funsies, then we'll slap a price tag on it so the exec bonuses can keep getting higher. We'd pay for the old Mozilla that cared about…
Mozilla is not pay-walling the open documentation, it’s still available. They are pay-walling features that make it easier to save pages, navigate, and use the docs offline.
There are alternatives, in the form of Devdocs.io, Zeal, and Dash, if you want similar features but don’t want to pay Mozilla.
You are not losing anything you already can access to my knowledge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll pay. But I kind of wish they were laser focused on just the content and not obligated to deliver useless pay for features.
The content isn't (and shouldn't be) paywalled. There's no option but to add other paid features around it, which someone users may find useless but others maybe won't. You could also always just treat it as a monthly donation and not use any of it.
Everyone who's been saying "I wish they would just charge money for this", here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is!
The big question is:
Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?
But hey, I’ll be supporting Mozilla and MDN so no real loss.
I suppose offline access is nice. I think I'd rather pay for the ability to just download the whole site in some officially supported way. Priming a PWA baked into browser storage is a little roundabout. I want it to be grepable.
It offers the same (i.e. offline documentations and PWA) and it is open source.
What a cash grab Firefox devs should quit this sinking ship ASAP, fork the browser and setup some sort of developer funds like blender/krita/gimp/godot and many other I'll be happy to donate directly to the firefox team without having to go through this mafia
I think I might already have done.
And I can send more if they start to go beyond Firefox and start fixing the things Mozilla have torn down.
What a cash grab Firefox devs should quit this sinking ship ASAP, fork the browser and setup some sort of developer funds like blender/krita/gimp/godot and many other I'll be happy to donate directly to the firefox team without having to go through this mafia
https://donate.mozilla.org/en-GB/
Everyone who's been saying "I wish they would just charge money for this", here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is!
Are they going to rehire all the dedicated editors and staff they laid off? Or is this really just charging money for all their now open source contributed content...
1. Entity donates resources to maintain a resource for free, while pulling in revenue from an unrelated source => they're beholden to that unrelated source and it's unsustainable, we shouldn't take them seriously.
2. Entity scales back to maintenance of that resource => they're abandoning what made them great.
3. Entity re-monetizes the resource more directly => what are they monetizing, they don't do anything to maintain it.
What people want is an instantaneous jump to:
4. Entity already has resource monetized and is already significantly maintaining that resource.
But a company in position #2 can't just jump directly to #4. It's fair to ask about the direction that a company is going and whether or not they'll follow up, but sometimes I feel like critics want teleportation, not movement.
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Mozilla is pretty clearly still investing into MDN (both in ways that I really like such as the learning areas, and in a few ways that I'm less thrilled about, like a few recent UX decisions). But if MDN plus allows them to continue that investment, it's worthwhile -- ideally, if they make enough money off of it, we might see them increase that investment. If there's evidence that they're not going to, then fine, I guess, but I don't really see that evidence.
What MDN Plus offers is basically what people have been asking for with Firefox except for MDN. It's direct funding for the product itself.
I'll also point out that providing a platform for permissive-licensed content is itself important work and should be supported. It is good that this content is permissively licensed, and alongside MDN plus, we can actually look at permissively licensed donated content as a way of "funding" a public resource. If the content wasn't permissively licensed, my feelings about that would be very different, but this isn't a scenario where people are donating resources to Mozilla that only Mozilla can use and that are then kept captive -- people are donating content that anyone can use and that anyone can modify and re-host, it's remaining in the control of the community.
That's not to say that we shouldn't try to get to #4 again, but an MDN without a ton of professional editors is still worth funding. Particularly given the contribution model, where if you really want to pay for editors you can just go hire editors yourself and pay them to contribute to MDN.
This reminds me a bit about the conversations about Wikipedia. I have tons of criticism about Wikipedia and tons of criticism about how it fundraises, but one of the criticisms I don't have is that it has too much money. Wikipedia is one of the most important resources on the entire Internet and it's good for a project like that to be over-funded. Similarly, I think MDN is one of the most important educational resources for Javascript on the entire Internet, and I don't really see the problem with giving it more money, even if all that was happening with that money was that it was being dumped into server resources or making the owners feel more comfortable about it.