I find hiding all of these articles behind a walled garden a little distasteful. I remember the times when I couldn't have afforded access to such information. Back then, this kind of stuff would have been published in a magazine, and that magazine would have been on the rack of my local bookstore, where I could have flipped through it to decide if it was worth my money.
MDN Plus
51–60 of 222 posts
Re: MDN Plus
#52With all the uncountable billions of dollars in the banks of Apple, Microsoft, Google etc, none of them can manage to come up with documentation to compete with MDN which has to go freemium to be viable. Presumably that’s because they can’t link your identity to it or something, making it nit worthwhile doing. Apple: “we’re a hardware company, it’s not our job to document the web” Microsoft: “Internet Explorer failed…
I wouldn't be including Microsoft in that list. Microsoft's own documentation is excellent.
Have you ever looked at MS documentation of the SharePoint REST API?
Re: MDN Plus
#53If EU really cared about privacy, EU would fully fund Mozilla.
If Mozilla was a european non-profit I would agree it would be great to have EU funding. But a foreign organization where the management are extracting millions and millions of dollars for questionable performance at best while firing vast amounts of employees? No way.
I agree. I'd like EU to sponsors Firefox development, but not by directly sponsoring Mozilla itself, especially not the Mozilla Foundation. Reducing reliance on Google and having people whose jobs is to challenge the hegemony of Google and Apple on web standards would be really nice.
Re: MDN Plus
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really understand how offering better content against money is worse than asking for money regularly like Wikipedia does (especially when they seem to just consume more and more money).
This feels more like a service rather than it being a subscription-based donation. It's not called Wikipedia Plus.
If it's to pay technical writers I don't see the problem. Wikipedia on the other hand ask for donations that seems absorbed by some kind of administrative black hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f7/Wikim...
Re: MDN Plus
#55I'm a long time MDN and Firefox user but I'm struggling to see the benefit of this beyond one free article a month? all of the other "features" are trivial without the subscription (bookmarks, save as pdf...). Seems like a very weak offering.
It feels like this could have landed with a bit more punch and a more compelling sell and it could very well evolve into something very valuable but I can't see the appeal right now.
Another commenter mentioned $10 a month but I'm seeing $5 at the moment. Right now there's just no features I'd consider paying anything for. I would happily pay $5-$10 a month though for something more fleshed out, more regular high quality technical deep dives and some other benefits that justify a regular subscription.
Re: MDN Plus
#56Obviously it would be nice if everything everywhere was always free, but docs and opensource suffer a lot from lack of sustainability when based on voluntary donations. Companies simply have no incentives to pay for anything.
There are surely tens of thousands of companies worldwide, whose employees rely on MDN on a daily basis. There are poor startups among them, but many of those companies have pretty deep pockets. If just a small percentage of those employees ask their bosses for this $5/mo. sub, this can improve things considerably. For now everything is free, so no one has an incentive, or a way, to pay.
As developers, we are collectively guilty for never asking our employees for anything which costs $$$. Many of us (me including) assume that asking for a few bucks sub is almost a crime. Or we don't want to deal with stupid bureaucracy and an arcane process to set up the sub.
Personally I hope the experiment will work. Let's see in a few months.
I think the best model would be something like: subscribers get the premium content immediately, other people with a few weeks/months delay. This would keep a healthy balance and keep the incentives in place for people to pay.
Re: MDN Plus
#57Should've done this before they slashed all the staff working on it. Seriously, what the hell is going on at Mozilla HQ - their CEO is a nutbar.
Re: MDN Plus
#58At first glance, this feels a little distasteful. I've always thought of the MDN docs like Wikipedia; a non-profit public resource. Attempting to monetize it feels... wrong somehow. So long as the docs themselves remain under CC-BY-SA though guess it's not really a problem. The premium features they currently offer seem reasonable, and if things ever get too out of hand the community could always just move to another…
I don't really understand how offering better content against money is worse than asking for money regularly like Wikipedia does (especially when they seem to just consume more and more money).
A paywall shuts out financially disadvantaged groups and limits the circulation of knowledge. Donations don’t, however annoying the banners are.
Whether overly abundant donations are misallocated is a completely orthogonal issue.
Note that I’m not saying we are entitled to anything; but slapping the MDN brand on a premium subscription service does tarnish the original brand a little.
Re: MDN Plus
#59Reminder that Mozilla fired the people that wrote the content.
And the CEO got another yearly raise.
Re: MDN Plus
#60With all the uncountable billions of dollars in the banks of Apple, Microsoft, Google etc, none of them can manage to come up with documentation to compete with MDN which has to go freemium to be viable. Presumably that’s because they can’t link your identity to it or something, making it nit worthwhile doing. Apple: “we’re a hardware company, it’s not our job to document the web” Microsoft: “Internet Explorer failed…
> Apple: “we’re a hardware company, it’s not our job to document the web” Or, as everyone who's ever had to look at Apple's developer documentation knows, to document their own operating system APIs.
I was using a WebRTC feature just yesterday that is listed as supported by Safari in modern versions of iOS all over the web. I can tell you for certain that it is 100% not.