14 ms·

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

417 points by MindGods 6y ago

jermier 6y ago
> Cult of the free This is poorly chosen language as it doesn't distinguish between freedom versus monetization. I think most users of free software know it's 'free as in freedom' and they are not being duped. I think most users of free services are duped into thinking it is actually free and are unaware their data is being sold and monetized and are paying for the service with their data. Lately more people are waking up to that fact though. I don't mean services like MDN, just things like Facebook, Google etc
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  We just need more hosted wikis where things are fulfilled by torrent or donation to a centralized source
- benmller313 6y ago
  I don't think the value in MDN is developers data so much as it's about controlling the defacto standards of Web Development.
  - jermier 6y ago
    I was referring to the phrase 'cult of the free' which is poorly chosen language as it doesn't distinguish between freedom versus monetization.
avolcano 6y ago
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 course, we all know that asking startups to actually fund open source (whether code, documentation, or learning resources) is like pulling teeth. I'd say maybe the collapse of some larger open source project(s) could convince companies to start actually giving a shit about whether or not the maintainers of the technology their entire businesses rely on have enough money to continue developing said technology, but it's more likely the companies would just say "well, let's put 10 engineers on this problem for a month to replace this dead open source technology with something new and shiny" and not recognize how much more they've had to spend. Or, y'know, they'll go with paid support of a Microsoft product or something.
- ROARosen 6y ago
  >MDN is a reference as much as it is a learning resource.. >Their employers, big or small, should be the ones paying for it. Your argument is counter intuitive, if it is truly a reference, then surely the developers themselves should pay for it. A company hires a developer with the expectation that they know their field (including the standards etc.). It is the developers' own concern if they (understandably) need a reference to help them execute what they were hired for.
  - benmller313 6y ago
    You describe the role of a contractor here, not an employee. The tools that I need, like a computer, an IDE, an Internet Connection, Software Licenses, and reference documents, should all be provided by the employer.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    If the developers are independent contractors, sure. If they are employees, no, the employer should pay Just like lawyers and LexisNexis and similar tools.
  - dual_dingo 6y ago
    Many employers pay for reference materials like this. Universities and hospitals pay insane amounts of money to Elsevier, Springer Nature & Co for scientific journals, others to orgs like ANSI, ISO or DIN. All this stuff is so expensive that no one can be expected to pay it out of his own pocket.
  - dgb23 6y ago
    Also bring your own chair and desk while we're at it. Oh and you definitely want to buy some toilet paper. Felix always keeps a stock on those but he never shares.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      Don't forget to bring a bucket of water from the well every morning - yea we've got working plumbing but that costs money and your developer salaries are unreasonable!
627467 6y ago
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.
- jagged-chisel 6y ago
  If we go wiki style, can we bootstrap with MDN? Is there a download with an acceptable license that could be used? I don't know if we'd get traction to bootstrap from nothing... EDIT: So I've found answers to my content questions at [1] - does the community have the appetite for an alternate site? 1 - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/About#Using_MDN_Web_Docs_content https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/About#Using_MDN...
  - tomduncalf 6y ago
    Looks like it (or the bulk of it) is licenced CC-BY-SA, so should be possible according to my understanding of the licence
- seabrookmx 6y ago
  It already is a wiki. You can contribute right now if you wanted..
  - 627467 6y ago
    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.
gambler 6y ago
>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 successor. Sounds like a decent idea, but a Patreon-style funding with different tiers will probably yield even better results.
- artificial 6y ago
  If it were to be obeyed, a slider like the Humble Bundle where the allocation to the charity, game provider, and HB are manipulatable would be fantastic.
  - jjordan 6y ago
    Fantastic idea. I'd be much more likely to donate to Mozilla if I could specifically allocate it to dev tools or MDN.
- nix23 6y ago
  >rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. Boom you hit the exact right spot!! Love it!
- bloat 6y ago
  Do you have these standards with all companies you pay for services? Seems like it might limit you somewhat...
  - z3ncyberpunk 6y ago
    That's the problem. People like you don't care about standards so companies run amuck while you just accept it and degrade the ecosystem.
  - giancarlostoro 6y ago
    Paying for services is different from donating to a large entity where you have no guarantee of where your money goes. Paying Microsoft for Office products for example I know I'm getting Office, aka what I'm paying for. In the case of tech based non-profits you have no idea where your money ends up. Unless you're a billionaire funding a new "part" of a non-profit or donating specifically to MDN, other people who can only donate say $50 might not be so lucky. Edit: This also makes me wonder if there's non-profits that work on tech that aren't throwing their money away beyond the scope of the project. The moment non-profits are doing more than just paying engineers and other essential employees / volunteers I begin to worry a bit.
zelly 6y ago
ArchWiki[1] is a counterexample to the notion that the community cannot write good technical documentation. It is actually much better written and more thorough than MDN, but it's also concerning a topic that attracts many hobbyists. To be fair, web dev is not something many people do without being paid, as opposed to tinkering with Linux, so the talent pool may be smaller. Also, the W3C and ECMA standards documents are all free and are more authoritative references than any wiki. It would be interesting to see if a language model e.g. GPT-3 could translate the standardese into something more readable to laymen. https://wiki.archlinux.org/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/
- potatoz2 6y ago
  ArchWiki is a good counterexample (so is Wikipedia I guess), but the W3C and ECMA specs are not: they document what ought to happen and are geared towards implementation, not what actually happens in practice or how to build a mental model about what happens.
soapdog 6y ago
I 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.
- manquer 6y ago
  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.
jameslk 6y ago
Google seems to be paying technical writers to build the free (growing) alternative to MDN, https://web.dev https://web.dev. It's not a generalized web resource yet like MDN, but just wait. Of course, you'll have to accept that the documentation here will likely have a Chrome-centric view of web development, further establishing the Chrome-only version of the web. The loss of MDN will just result in Firefox becoming less relevant. MDN was not just a free resource, it anchored Firefox's relevancy in the web development world. I believe the layoffs of the MDN team is a fairly significant strategic mistake for Mozilla.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  It looks pretty closed source.
  - billyhoffman 6y ago
    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
    - speedgoose 6y ago
      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/ https://web.dev/handbook/quick-start/
      - paulirish 6y ago
        FWIW, here's a typical edit to an existing article: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web.dev/pull/3678 https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web.dev/pull/3678
- MildlySerious 6y ago
  I already don't trust Google with the grip they have on the web. It doesn't seem like a good idea to let them be the ones to foster the next generation of webdevs, and provide the platform for learning and staying on top of things. There is no reason to trust that they will keep it as neutral ground and pay for it without ulterior motive, imo.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> If you deny these skills exist by pretending anyone can do it, you’re demeaning the people who have actually taken the time and trouble to build up those skills. See also: programming.
Timberwolf 6y ago
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 even slightly esoteric problem you'd bottom out a search pretty quickly and be on your own. Now, you'll find dozens of blog articles, community answers, Reddit threads... and unless you're very lucky they will all be wrong, from subtle "works on my machine"-isms up to "just commit a god-rights CI token to your repository, it'll be fine" - the telltale sign often being nobody can tell you why this is the solution, merely that they bashed other random solutions to related problems together until a particular combination happened to work. Authoritative sources like MDN are vital in this context, having something you can refer to that tells you how things actually work so you can verify whether the suggestion you or a co-worker found on a blog is a sensible solution or the kind of horrible mess you'd expect to find alongside world-writable S3 buckets and services that regularly time out due to being OOM killed.
- piefayth 6y ago
  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.
- megameter 6y ago
  To me this is related to the "terrarium problem" of software ecosystems, where the larger the ecosystem is, the more capable it is in some sense, but the less it can actually be understood. Web tech being all encompassing has made it an unsustainably large terrarium. And you can mitigate a terrarium's impact somewhat by defining a protocol around it, but then the protocol becomes the new terrarium. And so it goes. That is why it never really gets solved by more general-purpose layers, but it does get solved in some degree by the documentation, which at least gives you a map of the jungle, and it gets solved for any end use by distilling down to a smaller terrarium that can be understood by its definitions rather than its dependencies.
mola 6y ago
There's a third option, which is Taboo in the US.
- ashnehete 6y ago
  Can you please provide a link? Its really not giving relevant results on search engines.
- mjw1007 6y ago
  You're not being terribly clear. Do you mean to fund things like this from taxes, like (say) CERN or NASA?
phantom_oracle 6y ago
> It reminds me of breaking into spontaneous applause for our courageous health workers instead of funding them properly so they can do their jobs. > If not, this is all about making you feel better,... These 2 statements here reflect this weird behavior I have seen in certain countries like the UK where everyone will say things like "we <3 the NHS" or "protect the NHS" during the pandemic, but on the other end either the government or the proletariat or both will be unhappy to expand funding of the NHS. At times this behavior feels a bit cult-like and I also think that the dopamine-effects are meant more for those giving the applause.
wdb 6y ago
Says the man that forced its students to buy his book, if you didn't he would fail your class while not using the book at all in class
- hyperrail 6y ago
  Strong claim. Do you have a source for it?
rammy1234 6y ago
Developers and Employers who are not ready to pay for these sites like MDN are part of the problem. No Argument here.
- elric 6y ago
  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.
rammy1234 6y ago
What you mean by donation or contributing to the projects you are using. This site says that well. https://sigil-ebook.com/donate/ https://sigil-ebook.com/donate/
bosswipe 6y ago
Could you slap some ads on MDN and fund it that way?
Santosh83 6y ago
The wider community taking over maintaining MDN ought to be at least more feasible compared to say forking Firefox and keeping up with Chrome, which is a non-starter. I don't think we can rely on Google or Microsoft caring for MDN in the future. They may do so for a while, but will inevitably let it languish or turn it into something that heavily promotes their own visions. At the very least given the high traffic it ought to be getting, the current maintainers can try monetising it with non-invasive and contextual ads.
oliwarner 6y ago
I don't think shitting on others' praise for MDN makes anything about this better. Yes, it's an initiative that needs money. Maybe this will enthuse somebody up high to reconsider, or somebody else to take the torch and run with it. But even if it doesn't, a bit of recognition is nice. These are humans and even though it doesn't pay the bills, it might help somebody not feel they're as worthless as Mozilla imply. Stop dumping on these projects because you're all sourpuss about "free". You're only adding to the hurt.
egsec 6y ago
I think a good parallel is OWASP for web app security. The content is free and open for the internet. OWASP doesn't directly focus on curating the content and it is left up to the community. The content grows old and stale, errors do not get corrected, and the writing is often what I would call draft quality even when its published. There are always a lot more consumers than creators of content on any platform. Most people going to use a resource are not the same who can write about it, not everyone on YouTube has something to share or make a video. And why give it away for free when you can make a paid course, give a talk, charge consulting fees, sell a solution to a problem? You need to align incentives. Again, why contribute to something and possibly deal with the pain of moderation for free (costs instead of gain). Should we blindly trust the wisdom of the crowds? The other cost of free, is that the community may not be capable or not interested in sufficient moderation - this leads to low quality content which chases people away, even if there is good content right next to it. OWASP's incentives and objectives have never been 100% clear to me. There are some big security players involved, but it seems more interested in research, community, grants, etc versus content. When you look at MDN, Mozilla has a clear incentive to document these things so developers build more "standard" vs "Chrome-focused" web apps, which helps keep users on FireFox since all of their favorite sites are less likely to break without FireFox simply copying decision made by Chrome. By documenting expected action and quirks, it forces Google et al. to try to move back towards agreed upon standards. In security, I am generally more reliant upon vendor write ups and content from people with a reputation. Security has a much smaller population than web dev. Also, for web dev a lot of people pick it up and feel comfortable writing publicly even when they are just starting out (See Dev.To). I am not sure if companies pump millions of dollars into commercial web tools beyond graphics and CMS type stuff, so I wonder if a more decentralized collection of guidance is practical for the web, not to mention that there is a lot of nuance between browsers and even recent versions.
aazaa 6y ago
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.
- jermier 6y ago
  https://www.w3fools.com/ https://www.w3fools.com/
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
jermier 6y ago
It would be cool if MDN had a Stack Overflow question-and-answer style format alongside the main offering. Then Mozilla could take advantage of the gamification model where users earn badges and awards for their efforts. Jeff Atwood said it once: `If you put a number next to someone's name, then that person will try everything to increase that number`. Also: it would look good on CVs and would be a good heuristic to determine if a person's really fit for a position.
- superficialnerd 6y ago
  > If you put a number next to someone's name, then that person will try everything to increase that number Damn true!
dmix 6y ago
> I find I Love MDN demeaning to technical writers. It reminds me of breaking into spontaneous applause for our courageous health workers instead of funding them properly so they can do their jobs. Not surprising this is prevalent. This sort of ‘artificial positive feedback and positive thinking helps solves problems’ was rampant in schools. Not to mention social media significantly selects for performative behaviour over tangible and measurable support.
mekoka 6y ago
I think I understand the sentiment behind this post. But a few things give me pause: > Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat? I've seen some open-source authors/contributors successfully raise enough money, after they'd pledged to work on their project full-time. So the problem might not necessarily be to raise. But money has this uncanny ability to shift a project's focus. What happens when you raise more money than you actually need for the next 3 years (considering the scope of the project)? Will the project just mention that it doesn't need to raise more and just proceed to do what it's supposed to do? All the while spending and raising sensibly? Or will it find novel and creative ways to spend all this extra cash? > The problem with expecting volunteers to do this sort of work is that they burn out. Should we assume that once someone gets a salary they're somehow more resilient to burnout? I'd think that the burnout would be due to a volunteer biting much more than they should. So couldn't this also be an issue of work management and allocation? > The passionate community has nothing to do with anything, unless they’re willing to pay. A profoundly unscientific poll indicates that only about two-thirds of my responding followers are willing to do so. Is paying the only way to have helpful resources? I mean, we have the Wikipedia and StackExchange models that seem to provide decent value, even if not on par with MDN's standard. Would it be possible to have a model for MDN that meets somewhere in the middle, such as community contributed contents, moderated, reviewed, and edited by both community and full-time, knowledgeable, and paid staff? Unless I'm mistaken, I think the Linux kernel also follows something similar.
marcinzm 6y ago
>But will we be well served by that in the long run? Mozilla brought in $3.25 BILLION in revenue over the last 10 years. If they'd saved/invested a majority of it then they could go for decades without any further revenue. The business model was sound if they didn't decide to waste money.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Wasn't their business model mostly "We hope that Google keeps subsidizing us for no apparent reason?"
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    And it worked amazingly well given that they've received over $3 billion from Google. Had they then used that money to plan for the gift horse dying it would have worked out for decades more. But the people overseeing it wanted to build an empire rather than a sustainable foundation.
  - pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
    The payouts are neither "subsidizing" nor "for no apparent reason". Do you think the Mozilla–Yahoo deal was also an act of charity? It's baffling that people think that the arrangement between Mozilla and Google is unique. Google is paying royalties to Mozilla for driving attention to Google properties, just like they do with their other partners who aren't named "Mozilla".
yarrel 6y ago
"The co-signers unthinkingly assume they are entitled to free content." Oh sweetie, no. I feel entitled to Mozilla's management being competent and not killing the company. Appealing to developers is a precondition for that. MDN does that. But there are free alternatives. So charging for it would be counter-productive. If Mozilla had shown even trace amounts of competence at business development, rather than acting like a freshly-minted MBA parachuted into a university's administration, I might be more sympathetic. As it is I've formed a partnership with a violin manufacturer. Mozilla won't see any money from it but we're going to play them a very profitable-sounding sad tune as soon as we recover our initial investment.
bccdee 6y ago
> 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. Not everyone can afford to pay to use the road. If you want to get a job, often you'll need to drive to and from work for a good while before you'll have enough cash built up to meaningfully contribute to the road through your taxes. Of course, wealthy people wind up paying more, but often times they wouldn't have ever become wealthy if roads hadn't originally been available to them for free. Important infrastructure can be free for individuals when our society makes a commitment to collectively paying for it. MDN is an extremely important resource to beginner devs -- the exact people who would have trouble paying to support it. But supporting beginner devs is good for both the industry and the economy. Important public or open-source infrastructure such as MDN and Wikipedia should receive public grant money. We already do this with research grants for science, because there's a strong understanding that making research available for free makes society better. Informational infrastructure deserves the same consideration.
- PenguinCoder 6y ago
  >street is still free for everyday pedestrians No it's not. Taxes pay for this. Business taxes, property taxes, local taxes, gas tax, etc. It is decisively not free for pedestrians or commuters.
  - acdha 6y ago
    The three words you stripped out before that part of the quote address this: “access to the street”. With those, you are just echoing the poster's point that we use taxes to pay for common goods.
  - NikolaNovak 6y ago
    I feel that is addressed two sentences further into the post (unless it was a later edit), and as such contributes to the main point - who pays for it when and how much.
agentultra 6y ago
I feel like this also speaks to the wider trend in OSS. Businesses in many (the majority of?) and their programmers have come to expect free compilers, developer tools, libraries, security patches... and documentation and all that entails. "Open source," projects that are well funded appear "free," which seems to distort perceptions and opinions. Maintaining good documentation, like maintaining libraries, and good compilers takes a lot of on going effort. This creates value and deserves compensation. If not corporate sponsors, if not a patreon style model, what else can we do? Does everyone on the web contribute a little bit through volume collective licensing when you buy a domain or host a server or from profits of commercial entities on the web platform?
- eulenteufel 6y ago
  The EU could probably spare a dime on Firefox and MDN, the US and other big nations too. I find public infrastructure of the internet is something I wouldn't mind my taxes being spent on. Of course this opens another bag of problems of how to decide on which projects to finance how much or unwanted govermental influence on the projects. But I would still say it is a realistic alternative to corporate sponsors and patreon style funding.
Communitivity 6y ago
I'd pay $50/year to keep MDN afloat and current, though would prefer $24 ($2 per month). I think Patreon is an excellent idea. Perhaps a combination: Patreon for continuous funding and development; kickstarter for specific big features/releases (e.g., resurrecting Places and implementing it in Servo). Also, has anyone archived MDN, in case they pull the plug on it unexpectedly now the team is gone?
divbzero 6y ago
Should roads be free to drive on? Clean water, primary education, or firefighting be free for public use? I don’t think there are black or white answers to these questions. There are toll roads and freeways, for-profit but regulated water utilities, “free” education and firefighting funded through taxes. But all of these, like MDN, are public goods [1] where some pooling of resources makes sense. It’s not so much wanting them to be free as it is wanting shared low cost options. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vertbhrtn 6y ago
What's exactly difficult in running the MDN? It's just a bunch of makrdown files contributed to by folks on payroll from Google and co. The content can be hosted on github and served via github pages. This looks like a $25/year operation to me (total, not from each MDN user). The real value comes from those folks on payroll who update MDN, but the big tech is already willing to pay for that.
manquer 6y ago
I find the premise technical writing is under appreciated or is only a professional skill little odd. Wikipedia and StackOverflow have proved that technical writing can be done by community and crowd sourced effectively with active moderation. This model has and can work, even independent sites like caniuse.com have been able to good quality content and are used widely.
- muricula 6y ago
  The community can do an okay job but not a great one. The writing on Wikipedia is shoddy and inconsistent, and there are many many missing sources even if the article is accurate. I'm a huge fan though! Similarly, many stack overflow questions are out of date, and good luck getting them updated to reflect current best practices. And if you do ask the same question again trying to resurface a newer, better way to do something it will almost certainly be closed as a duplicate. Huge fan of the resource though. Ultimately, experienced professionals who are paid full time to be both writers and technologists can do a better job, especially over a long period of time.
  - manquer 6y ago
    I am not sure dedicated full time employees can do better job as whole, on a single person level a professional developer, encyclopedist or writer will outperform even the best amateurs sure, but as a community many open source projects ( documentation or applications) have outperformed professional ones many times. PostgreSQL is a good example, it fantastic documentation and runs on mostly volunteer work the documentation is on par (IMHO better) to say Oracle/ MSSQL/ DB2 documentation which have paid professional writers behind it for example Quality is more a function of editorial oversight rather than nature of contributions itself. SO and wikipedia has both been effective partly because of stricter review process ( reason their brands are trusted) and also have been criticized for it, getting the balance right is not easy. Sub-reddits are good way to study this, there are ones which emphasize on participation over quality and vice versa, i.e. optimize for the reader or the writer. There are no perfect solution, and communities must keep changing, early on contributions are more important i.e. quantity, as the site and brand grows large quality is more important (SO and wiki both went through this lifecycle). MDN has very different starting point - strong brand and content quality but no contributing community. They will have to come with something that fits their unique needs.
elric 6y ago
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? [1] https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/ https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/
adreamingsoul 6y ago
I'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.
dimitrios1 6y ago
> 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.
skybrian 6y ago
I 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] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat
_qulr 6y ago
I think the fundamental problem is that the web has no clear organizational structure. Although the internet itself is decentralized, it has a fairly clear organization structure, where each part of the internet has ownership, and there are explicit relationships, and expectations, and modes of cooperation between the various parties. In the past, the W3C was at least nominally "in charge" of the web. They were the natural providers of documentation. But then 2 big things happened: (1) vehement disagreement between the W3C and the browser vendors over the successor to HTML4, and (2) the "mobile revolution", which changed the landscape of the whole tech industry. To a significant extent, W3C has been sidelined by WHATWG. So now, WHATWG would be the natural providers of documentation for the web. However, WHATWG is dominated by Google/Apple/Microsoft, and nobody really trusts those BigCos to run the web, even if they do actually run the web by virtue of their market share dominance. And each of those BigCos has their own agenda which is not necessarily beneficial for the open web. Thus, we're left with a leadership vacuum. We can try to "crowdsource" documentation, but that ultimately seems doomed to failure IMO, as most crowdsourcing efforts are. (The well known "tragedy of the commons".) I don't have a solution to these problems myself, to be sure. Sorry! I do agree that the solution needs to be permanent organizational funding of professional writers, but I don't know who that organization should be.
- gowld 6y ago
  > think the fundamental problem is that the web has no clear organizational structure. think the fundamental problem is that the Universe has no clear organizational structure. We have to make it up as we go a long. Even a national government was simply made up by some people and enforced by the use of force, the only law of nature.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    Sure, but that only works if a critical mass of people rally behind specific leadership. Millions of individuals acting independently is just chaos. So the question is, which web organization should we rally behind? WHATWG? Well, ok, but... ugh.
jonas21 6y ago
Defunding MDN seems like an enormous strategic blunder on Mozilla's part. Its existence and popularity help ensure that developers are writing to the standard, and not just Chrome's implementation of the standard. This is good for everybody, but in particular for Mozilla because it reduces the chance that people will write things that work on Chrome but not Firefox and then just call it a day.
renewiltord 6y ago
Interesting. So the browser-compatibility section is not crowd-sourceable. I never read it, though. It does appear that there is no incentive for a browser engine to report that they are incompatible with something, only that they are compatible with something, but perhaps doing the latter implicitly implies through omission those for whom they are incompatible so that degenerates to "browser vendors will not report compatibility". So be it. I think the rest is standards translation plus examples. For this sort of thing, content isn't king, content is pawn. Back to w3schools or whatever, I suppose. Not the end of the world. I think if it came to it, this could be BountySourced (or whatever the acceptable solution is now) and just suck up the fact that we won't have compatibility. With Evergreen browsers that's a moving target anyway.
punnerud 6y ago
MDM = Mozilla Developer Network
fefe23 6y ago
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.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
MDN = Mozilla Developer Network. Most people wouldn't know what this is about. Tell them at the beginning of every web page.
yencabulator 6y ago
1. The idea that these standards need third-party write-ups for basic reference (not tutorial) use boggles my mind. Why is the main standard so unusable that we can't rely on it to explain what a form element is. The web "standards" have a history of this. It's a self-caused problem -- fix the problem, don't paper over it. 2. A lot of this complaint seems to be about needing to repeat manual browser testing regularly. Why is it manual? 3. The web is a bloated, overcomplex, platform with hundreds of talented people full time employed to make it more complex every day. Since it seems HTML+CSS+Javascript cannot be contained inside any line drawn, can we figure out something like a WASM + son-of-DOM simpler reboot that throws out as much of this complexity as possible? As in, stop using the existing HTML tags and default CSS, let the app define new ones along the lines of WebComponents, and make the DOM be just a rendering engine to get things like universal text selection and copy-paste (as opposed to everything just blitting to a canvas and reimplementing that). Of course I'm oversimplifying -- but I really think the world needs an old school "hourglass figure architecture" here to limit this feature creep.
nojvek 6y ago
I would pay for MDN. Their docs are really well done. I've used css-type package, which is autogenerated from the mdn json docs. It makes the development wonderful, no AI can match that. How do I put my money into the MDN fund, so it doesn't go to that a-hole CEO who gets million dollars of salary?
gregors 6y ago
I'd suggest that successful monetization strategy has already been accomplished at w3schools. Is it pretty? No. How about Stackoverflow? Prettier and that seems to work ok too. Looks like MDN was on mediawiki at some point. It worked fine then too. Who pays for Wikipedia? Who pays for NPR? People do use fundraisers from time to time. Where are all the Universities in this? Should they have a roll in any of this? Seems like all the Ivy League places could donate? Maybe they already do. I suggest that if the management team at Mozilla were actually good at their jobs maybe MDN would already me profitable. I'd also suggest that it's in browser manufacturer's interest to provide documentation. If MDN disappears something will fill that void. Maybe it's time for a change. If all else fails, just slap everything into a man page.
garrison 6y ago
It sounds like MDN could benefit from being the work of a 501(c)(6) business league, which is how the Linux Foundation's work is funded. Money could initially come from the big existing browser vendors. It is in everyone's interest to see it continue.

417 points by MindGods 6y ago

> Cult of the free This is poorly chosen language as it doesn't distinguish between freedom versus monetization. I think most users of free software know it's 'free as in freedom' and they are not being duped. I think most users of free services are duped into thinking it is actually free and are unaware their data is being sold and monetized and are paying for the service with their data. Lately more people are waking up to that fact though. I don't mean services like MDN, just things like Facebook, Google etc

sushshshsh 6y ago
We just need more hosted wikis where things are fulfilled by torrent or donation to a centralized source
benmller313 6y ago
I don't think the value in MDN is developers data so much as it's about controlling the defacto standards of Web Development.
- jermier 6y ago
  I was referring to the phrase 'cult of the free' which is poorly chosen language as it doesn't distinguish between freedom versus monetization.

avolcano 6y ago

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 course, we all know that asking startups to actually fund open source (whether code, documentation, or learning resources) is like pulling teeth. I'd say maybe the collapse of some larger open source project(s) could convince companies to start actually giving a shit about whether or not the maintainers of the technology their entire businesses rely on have enough money to continue developing said technology, but it's more likely the companies would just say "well, let's put 10 engineers on this problem for a month to replace this dead open source technology with something new and shiny" and not recognize how much more they've had to spend. Or, y'know, they'll go with paid support of a Microsoft product or something.

ROARosen 6y ago
>MDN is a reference as much as it is a learning resource.. >Their employers, big or small, should be the ones paying for it. Your argument is counter intuitive, if it is truly a reference, then surely the developers themselves should pay for it. A company hires a developer with the expectation that they know their field (including the standards etc.). It is the developers' own concern if they (understandably) need a reference to help them execute what they were hired for.
- benmller313 6y ago
  You describe the role of a contractor here, not an employee. The tools that I need, like a computer, an IDE, an Internet Connection, Software Licenses, and reference documents, should all be provided by the employer.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  If the developers are independent contractors, sure. If they are employees, no, the employer should pay Just like lawyers and LexisNexis and similar tools.
- dual_dingo 6y ago
  Many employers pay for reference materials like this. Universities and hospitals pay insane amounts of money to Elsevier, Springer Nature & Co for scientific journals, others to orgs like ANSI, ISO or DIN. All this stuff is so expensive that no one can be expected to pay it out of his own pocket.
- dgb23 6y ago
  Also bring your own chair and desk while we're at it. Oh and you definitely want to buy some toilet paper. Felix always keeps a stock on those but he never shares.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Don't forget to bring a bucket of water from the well every morning - yea we've got working plumbing but that costs money and your developer salaries are unreasonable!

627467 6y ago

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.

jagged-chisel 6y ago
If we go wiki style, can we bootstrap with MDN? Is there a download with an acceptable license that could be used? I don't know if we'd get traction to bootstrap from nothing... EDIT: So I've found answers to my content questions at [1] - does the community have the appetite for an alternate site? 1 - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/About#Using_MDN_Web_Docs_content https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/About#Using_MDN...
- tomduncalf 6y ago
  Looks like it (or the bulk of it) is licenced CC-BY-SA, so should be possible according to my understanding of the licence
seabrookmx 6y ago
It already is a wiki. You can contribute right now if you wanted..
- 627467 6y ago
  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.

gambler 6y ago

>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 successor. Sounds like a decent idea, but a Patreon-style funding with different tiers will probably yield even better results.

artificial 6y ago
If it were to be obeyed, a slider like the Humble Bundle where the allocation to the charity, game provider, and HB are manipulatable would be fantastic.
- jjordan 6y ago
  Fantastic idea. I'd be much more likely to donate to Mozilla if I could specifically allocate it to dev tools or MDN.
nix23 6y ago
>rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups. Boom you hit the exact right spot!! Love it!
bloat 6y ago
Do you have these standards with all companies you pay for services? Seems like it might limit you somewhat...
- z3ncyberpunk 6y ago
  That's the problem. People like you don't care about standards so companies run amuck while you just accept it and degrade the ecosystem.
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  Paying for services is different from donating to a large entity where you have no guarantee of where your money goes. Paying Microsoft for Office products for example I know I'm getting Office, aka what I'm paying for. In the case of tech based non-profits you have no idea where your money ends up. Unless you're a billionaire funding a new "part" of a non-profit or donating specifically to MDN, other people who can only donate say $50 might not be so lucky. Edit: This also makes me wonder if there's non-profits that work on tech that aren't throwing their money away beyond the scope of the project. The moment non-profits are doing more than just paying engineers and other essential employees / volunteers I begin to worry a bit.

zelly 6y ago

ArchWiki[1] is a counterexample to the notion that the community cannot write good technical documentation. It is actually much better written and more thorough than MDN, but it's also concerning a topic that attracts many hobbyists. To be fair, web dev is not something many people do without being paid, as opposed to tinkering with Linux, so the talent pool may be smaller. Also, the W3C and ECMA standards documents are all free and are more authoritative references than any wiki. It would be interesting to see if a language model e.g. GPT-3 could translate the standardese into something more readable to laymen. https://wiki.archlinux.org/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/

potatoz2 6y ago
ArchWiki is a good counterexample (so is Wikipedia I guess), but the W3C and ECMA specs are not: they document what ought to happen and are geared towards implementation, not what actually happens in practice or how to build a mental model about what happens.

soapdog 6y ago

I 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.

manquer 6y ago
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.

jameslk 6y ago

Google seems to be paying technical writers to build the free (growing) alternative to MDN, https://web.dev https://web.dev. It's not a generalized web resource yet like MDN, but just wait. Of course, you'll have to accept that the documentation here will likely have a Chrome-centric view of web development, further establishing the Chrome-only version of the web. The loss of MDN will just result in Firefox becoming less relevant. MDN was not just a free resource, it anchored Firefox's relevancy in the web development world. I believe the layoffs of the MDN team is a fairly significant strategic mistake for Mozilla.

speedgoose 6y ago
It looks pretty closed source.
- billyhoffman 6y ago
  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
  - speedgoose 6y ago
    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/ https://web.dev/handbook/quick-start/
    - paulirish 6y ago
      FWIW, here's a typical edit to an existing article: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web.dev/pull/3678 https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web.dev/pull/3678
MildlySerious 6y ago
I already don't trust Google with the grip they have on the web. It doesn't seem like a good idea to let them be the ones to foster the next generation of webdevs, and provide the platform for learning and staying on top of things. There is no reason to trust that they will keep it as neutral ground and pay for it without ulterior motive, imo.

commandlinefan 6y ago

> If you deny these skills exist by pretending anyone can do it, you’re demeaning the people who have actually taken the time and trouble to build up those skills. See also: programming.

Timberwolf 6y ago

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 even slightly esoteric problem you'd bottom out a search pretty quickly and be on your own. Now, you'll find dozens of blog articles, community answers, Reddit threads... and unless you're very lucky they will all be wrong, from subtle "works on my machine"-isms up to "just commit a god-rights CI token to your repository, it'll be fine" - the telltale sign often being nobody can tell you why this is the solution, merely that they bashed other random solutions to related problems together until a particular combination happened to work. Authoritative sources like MDN are vital in this context, having something you can refer to that tells you how things actually work so you can verify whether the suggestion you or a co-worker found on a blog is a sensible solution or the kind of horrible mess you'd expect to find alongside world-writable S3 buckets and services that regularly time out due to being OOM killed.

piefayth 6y ago
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.
megameter 6y ago
To me this is related to the "terrarium problem" of software ecosystems, where the larger the ecosystem is, the more capable it is in some sense, but the less it can actually be understood. Web tech being all encompassing has made it an unsustainably large terrarium. And you can mitigate a terrarium's impact somewhat by defining a protocol around it, but then the protocol becomes the new terrarium. And so it goes. That is why it never really gets solved by more general-purpose layers, but it does get solved in some degree by the documentation, which at least gives you a map of the jungle, and it gets solved for any end use by distilling down to a smaller terrarium that can be understood by its definitions rather than its dependencies.

mola 6y ago

There's a third option, which is Taboo in the US.

ashnehete 6y ago
Can you please provide a link? Its really not giving relevant results on search engines.
mjw1007 6y ago
You're not being terribly clear. Do you mean to fund things like this from taxes, like (say) CERN or NASA?

phantom_oracle 6y ago

> It reminds me of breaking into spontaneous applause for our courageous health workers instead of funding them properly so they can do their jobs. > If not, this is all about making you feel better,... These 2 statements here reflect this weird behavior I have seen in certain countries like the UK where everyone will say things like "we <3 the NHS" or "protect the NHS" during the pandemic, but on the other end either the government or the proletariat or both will be unhappy to expand funding of the NHS. At times this behavior feels a bit cult-like and I also think that the dopamine-effects are meant more for those giving the applause.

wdb 6y ago

Says the man that forced its students to buy his book, if you didn't he would fail your class while not using the book at all in class

hyperrail 6y ago
Strong claim. Do you have a source for it?

rammy1234 6y ago

Developers and Employers who are not ready to pay for these sites like MDN are part of the problem. No Argument here.

elric 6y ago
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.

rammy1234 6y ago

What you mean by donation or contributing to the projects you are using. This site says that well. https://sigil-ebook.com/donate/ https://sigil-ebook.com/donate/

bosswipe 6y ago

Could you slap some ads on MDN and fund it that way?

Santosh83 6y ago

The wider community taking over maintaining MDN ought to be at least more feasible compared to say forking Firefox and keeping up with Chrome, which is a non-starter. I don't think we can rely on Google or Microsoft caring for MDN in the future. They may do so for a while, but will inevitably let it languish or turn it into something that heavily promotes their own visions. At the very least given the high traffic it ought to be getting, the current maintainers can try monetising it with non-invasive and contextual ads.

oliwarner 6y ago

I don't think shitting on others' praise for MDN makes anything about this better. Yes, it's an initiative that needs money. Maybe this will enthuse somebody up high to reconsider, or somebody else to take the torch and run with it. But even if it doesn't, a bit of recognition is nice. These are humans and even though it doesn't pay the bills, it might help somebody not feel they're as worthless as Mozilla imply. Stop dumping on these projects because you're all sourpuss about "free". You're only adding to the hurt.

egsec 6y ago

I think a good parallel is OWASP for web app security. The content is free and open for the internet. OWASP doesn't directly focus on curating the content and it is left up to the community. The content grows old and stale, errors do not get corrected, and the writing is often what I would call draft quality even when its published. There are always a lot more consumers than creators of content on any platform. Most people going to use a resource are not the same who can write about it, not everyone on YouTube has something to share or make a video. And why give it away for free when you can make a paid course, give a talk, charge consulting fees, sell a solution to a problem? You need to align incentives. Again, why contribute to something and possibly deal with the pain of moderation for free (costs instead of gain). Should we blindly trust the wisdom of the crowds? The other cost of free, is that the community may not be capable or not interested in sufficient moderation - this leads to low quality content which chases people away, even if there is good content right next to it. OWASP's incentives and objectives have never been 100% clear to me. There are some big security players involved, but it seems more interested in research, community, grants, etc versus content. When you look at MDN, Mozilla has a clear incentive to document these things so developers build more "standard" vs "Chrome-focused" web apps, which helps keep users on FireFox since all of their favorite sites are less likely to break without FireFox simply copying decision made by Chrome. By documenting expected action and quirks, it forces Google et al. to try to move back towards agreed upon standards. In security, I am generally more reliant upon vendor write ups and content from people with a reputation. Security has a much smaller population than web dev. Also, for web dev a lot of people pick it up and feel comfortable writing publicly even when they are just starting out (See Dev.To). I am not sure if companies pump millions of dollars into commercial web tools beyond graphics and CMS type stuff, so I wonder if a more decentralized collection of guidance is practical for the web, not to mention that there is a lot of nuance between browsers and even recent versions.

aazaa 6y ago

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.

jermier 6y ago
https://www.w3fools.com/ https://www.w3fools.com/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

jermier 6y ago

It would be cool if MDN had a Stack Overflow question-and-answer style format alongside the main offering. Then Mozilla could take advantage of the gamification model where users earn badges and awards for their efforts. Jeff Atwood said it once: `If you put a number next to someone's name, then that person will try everything to increase that number`. Also: it would look good on CVs and would be a good heuristic to determine if a person's really fit for a position.

superficialnerd 6y ago
> If you put a number next to someone's name, then that person will try everything to increase that number Damn true!

dmix 6y ago

> I find I Love MDN demeaning to technical writers. It reminds me of breaking into spontaneous applause for our courageous health workers instead of funding them properly so they can do their jobs. Not surprising this is prevalent. This sort of ‘artificial positive feedback and positive thinking helps solves problems’ was rampant in schools. Not to mention social media significantly selects for performative behaviour over tangible and measurable support.

mekoka 6y ago

I think I understand the sentiment behind this post. But a few things give me pause: > Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat? I've seen some open-source authors/contributors successfully raise enough money, after they'd pledged to work on their project full-time. So the problem might not necessarily be to raise. But money has this uncanny ability to shift a project's focus. What happens when you raise more money than you actually need for the next 3 years (considering the scope of the project)? Will the project just mention that it doesn't need to raise more and just proceed to do what it's supposed to do? All the while spending and raising sensibly? Or will it find novel and creative ways to spend all this extra cash? > The problem with expecting volunteers to do this sort of work is that they burn out. Should we assume that once someone gets a salary they're somehow more resilient to burnout? I'd think that the burnout would be due to a volunteer biting much more than they should. So couldn't this also be an issue of work management and allocation? > The passionate community has nothing to do with anything, unless they’re willing to pay. A profoundly unscientific poll indicates that only about two-thirds of my responding followers are willing to do so. Is paying the only way to have helpful resources? I mean, we have the Wikipedia and StackExchange models that seem to provide decent value, even if not on par with MDN's standard. Would it be possible to have a model for MDN that meets somewhere in the middle, such as community contributed contents, moderated, reviewed, and edited by both community and full-time, knowledgeable, and paid staff? Unless I'm mistaken, I think the Linux kernel also follows something similar.

marcinzm 6y ago

>But will we be well served by that in the long run? Mozilla brought in $3.25 BILLION in revenue over the last 10 years. If they'd saved/invested a majority of it then they could go for decades without any further revenue. The business model was sound if they didn't decide to waste money.

munk-a 6y ago
Wasn't their business model mostly "We hope that Google keeps subsidizing us for no apparent reason?"
- marcinzm 6y ago
  And it worked amazingly well given that they've received over $3 billion from Google. Had they then used that money to plan for the gift horse dying it would have worked out for decades more. But the people overseeing it wanted to build an empire rather than a sustainable foundation.
- pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
  The payouts are neither "subsidizing" nor "for no apparent reason". Do you think the Mozilla–Yahoo deal was also an act of charity? It's baffling that people think that the arrangement between Mozilla and Google is unique. Google is paying royalties to Mozilla for driving attention to Google properties, just like they do with their other partners who aren't named "Mozilla".

yarrel 6y ago

"The co-signers unthinkingly assume they are entitled to free content." Oh sweetie, no. I feel entitled to Mozilla's management being competent and not killing the company. Appealing to developers is a precondition for that. MDN does that. But there are free alternatives. So charging for it would be counter-productive. If Mozilla had shown even trace amounts of competence at business development, rather than acting like a freshly-minted MBA parachuted into a university's administration, I might be more sympathetic. As it is I've formed a partnership with a violin manufacturer. Mozilla won't see any money from it but we're going to play them a very profitable-sounding sad tune as soon as we recover our initial investment.

bccdee 6y ago

> 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. Not everyone can afford to pay to use the road. If you want to get a job, often you'll need to drive to and from work for a good while before you'll have enough cash built up to meaningfully contribute to the road through your taxes. Of course, wealthy people wind up paying more, but often times they wouldn't have ever become wealthy if roads hadn't originally been available to them for free. Important infrastructure can be free for individuals when our society makes a commitment to collectively paying for it. MDN is an extremely important resource to beginner devs -- the exact people who would have trouble paying to support it. But supporting beginner devs is good for both the industry and the economy. Important public or open-source infrastructure such as MDN and Wikipedia should receive public grant money. We already do this with research grants for science, because there's a strong understanding that making research available for free makes society better. Informational infrastructure deserves the same consideration.

PenguinCoder 6y ago
>street is still free for everyday pedestrians No it's not. Taxes pay for this. Business taxes, property taxes, local taxes, gas tax, etc. It is decisively not free for pedestrians or commuters.
- acdha 6y ago
  The three words you stripped out before that part of the quote address this: “access to the street”. With those, you are just echoing the poster's point that we use taxes to pay for common goods.
- NikolaNovak 6y ago
  I feel that is addressed two sentences further into the post (unless it was a later edit), and as such contributes to the main point - who pays for it when and how much.

agentultra 6y ago

I feel like this also speaks to the wider trend in OSS. Businesses in many (the majority of?) and their programmers have come to expect free compilers, developer tools, libraries, security patches... and documentation and all that entails. "Open source," projects that are well funded appear "free," which seems to distort perceptions and opinions. Maintaining good documentation, like maintaining libraries, and good compilers takes a lot of on going effort. This creates value and deserves compensation. If not corporate sponsors, if not a patreon style model, what else can we do? Does everyone on the web contribute a little bit through volume collective licensing when you buy a domain or host a server or from profits of commercial entities on the web platform?

eulenteufel 6y ago
The EU could probably spare a dime on Firefox and MDN, the US and other big nations too. I find public infrastructure of the internet is something I wouldn't mind my taxes being spent on. Of course this opens another bag of problems of how to decide on which projects to finance how much or unwanted govermental influence on the projects. But I would still say it is a realistic alternative to corporate sponsors and patreon style funding.

Communitivity 6y ago

I'd pay $50/year to keep MDN afloat and current, though would prefer $24 ($2 per month). I think Patreon is an excellent idea. Perhaps a combination: Patreon for continuous funding and development; kickstarter for specific big features/releases (e.g., resurrecting Places and implementing it in Servo). Also, has anyone archived MDN, in case they pull the plug on it unexpectedly now the team is gone?

divbzero 6y ago

Should roads be free to drive on? Clean water, primary education, or firefighting be free for public use? I don’t think there are black or white answers to these questions. There are toll roads and freeways, for-profit but regulated water utilities, “free” education and firefighting funded through taxes. But all of these, like MDN, are public goods [1] where some pooling of resources makes sense. It’s not so much wanting them to be free as it is wanting shared low cost options. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

vertbhrtn 6y ago

What's exactly difficult in running the MDN? It's just a bunch of makrdown files contributed to by folks on payroll from Google and co. The content can be hosted on github and served via github pages. This looks like a $25/year operation to me (total, not from each MDN user). The real value comes from those folks on payroll who update MDN, but the big tech is already willing to pay for that.

manquer 6y ago

I find the premise technical writing is under appreciated or is only a professional skill little odd. Wikipedia and StackOverflow have proved that technical writing can be done by community and crowd sourced effectively with active moderation. This model has and can work, even independent sites like caniuse.com have been able to good quality content and are used widely.

muricula 6y ago
The community can do an okay job but not a great one. The writing on Wikipedia is shoddy and inconsistent, and there are many many missing sources even if the article is accurate. I'm a huge fan though! Similarly, many stack overflow questions are out of date, and good luck getting them updated to reflect current best practices. And if you do ask the same question again trying to resurface a newer, better way to do something it will almost certainly be closed as a duplicate. Huge fan of the resource though. Ultimately, experienced professionals who are paid full time to be both writers and technologists can do a better job, especially over a long period of time.
- manquer 6y ago
  I am not sure dedicated full time employees can do better job as whole, on a single person level a professional developer, encyclopedist or writer will outperform even the best amateurs sure, but as a community many open source projects ( documentation or applications) have outperformed professional ones many times. PostgreSQL is a good example, it fantastic documentation and runs on mostly volunteer work the documentation is on par (IMHO better) to say Oracle/ MSSQL/ DB2 documentation which have paid professional writers behind it for example Quality is more a function of editorial oversight rather than nature of contributions itself. SO and wikipedia has both been effective partly because of stricter review process ( reason their brands are trusted) and also have been criticized for it, getting the balance right is not easy. Sub-reddits are good way to study this, there are ones which emphasize on participation over quality and vice versa, i.e. optimize for the reader or the writer. There are no perfect solution, and communities must keep changing, early on contributions are more important i.e. quantity, as the site and brand grows large quality is more important (SO and wiki both went through this lifecycle). MDN has very different starting point - strong brand and content quality but no contributing community. They will have to come with something that fits their unique needs.

elric 6y ago

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? [1] https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/ https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/

adreamingsoul 6y ago

I'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.

dimitrios1 6y ago

> 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.

skybrian 6y ago

I 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] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat

_qulr 6y ago

I think the fundamental problem is that the web has no clear organizational structure. Although the internet itself is decentralized, it has a fairly clear organization structure, where each part of the internet has ownership, and there are explicit relationships, and expectations, and modes of cooperation between the various parties. In the past, the W3C was at least nominally "in charge" of the web. They were the natural providers of documentation. But then 2 big things happened: (1) vehement disagreement between the W3C and the browser vendors over the successor to HTML4, and (2) the "mobile revolution", which changed the landscape of the whole tech industry. To a significant extent, W3C has been sidelined by WHATWG. So now, WHATWG would be the natural providers of documentation for the web. However, WHATWG is dominated by Google/Apple/Microsoft, and nobody really trusts those BigCos to run the web, even if they do actually run the web by virtue of their market share dominance. And each of those BigCos has their own agenda which is not necessarily beneficial for the open web. Thus, we're left with a leadership vacuum. We can try to "crowdsource" documentation, but that ultimately seems doomed to failure IMO, as most crowdsourcing efforts are. (The well known "tragedy of the commons".) I don't have a solution to these problems myself, to be sure. Sorry! I do agree that the solution needs to be permanent organizational funding of professional writers, but I don't know who that organization should be.

gowld 6y ago
> think the fundamental problem is that the web has no clear organizational structure. think the fundamental problem is that the Universe has no clear organizational structure. We have to make it up as we go a long. Even a national government was simply made up by some people and enforced by the use of force, the only law of nature.
- _qulr 6y ago
  Sure, but that only works if a critical mass of people rally behind specific leadership. Millions of individuals acting independently is just chaos. So the question is, which web organization should we rally behind? WHATWG? Well, ok, but... ugh.

jonas21 6y ago

Defunding MDN seems like an enormous strategic blunder on Mozilla's part. Its existence and popularity help ensure that developers are writing to the standard, and not just Chrome's implementation of the standard. This is good for everybody, but in particular for Mozilla because it reduces the chance that people will write things that work on Chrome but not Firefox and then just call it a day.

renewiltord 6y ago

Interesting. So the browser-compatibility section is not crowd-sourceable. I never read it, though. It does appear that there is no incentive for a browser engine to report that they are incompatible with something, only that they are compatible with something, but perhaps doing the latter implicitly implies through omission those for whom they are incompatible so that degenerates to "browser vendors will not report compatibility". So be it. I think the rest is standards translation plus examples. For this sort of thing, content isn't king, content is pawn. Back to w3schools or whatever, I suppose. Not the end of the world. I think if it came to it, this could be BountySourced (or whatever the acceptable solution is now) and just suck up the fact that we won't have compatibility. With Evergreen browsers that's a moving target anyway.

punnerud 6y ago

MDM = Mozilla Developer Network

fefe23 6y ago

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.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

MDN = Mozilla Developer Network. Most people wouldn't know what this is about. Tell them at the beginning of every web page.

yencabulator 6y ago

1. The idea that these standards need third-party write-ups for basic reference (not tutorial) use boggles my mind. Why is the main standard so unusable that we can't rely on it to explain what a form element is. The web "standards" have a history of this. It's a self-caused problem -- fix the problem, don't paper over it. 2. A lot of this complaint seems to be about needing to repeat manual browser testing regularly. Why is it manual? 3. The web is a bloated, overcomplex, platform with hundreds of talented people full time employed to make it more complex every day. Since it seems HTML+CSS+Javascript cannot be contained inside any line drawn, can we figure out something like a WASM + son-of-DOM simpler reboot that throws out as much of this complexity as possible? As in, stop using the existing HTML tags and default CSS, let the app define new ones along the lines of WebComponents, and make the DOM be just a rendering engine to get things like universal text selection and copy-paste (as opposed to everything just blitting to a canvas and reimplementing that). Of course I'm oversimplifying -- but I really think the world needs an old school "hourglass figure architecture" here to limit this feature creep.

nojvek 6y ago

I would pay for MDN. Their docs are really well done. I've used css-type package, which is autogenerated from the mdn json docs. It makes the development wonderful, no AI can match that. How do I put my money into the MDN fund, so it doesn't go to that a-hole CEO who gets million dollars of salary?

gregors 6y ago

I'd suggest that successful monetization strategy has already been accomplished at w3schools. Is it pretty? No. How about Stackoverflow? Prettier and that seems to work ok too. Looks like MDN was on mediawiki at some point. It worked fine then too. Who pays for Wikipedia? Who pays for NPR? People do use fundraisers from time to time. Where are all the Universities in this? Should they have a roll in any of this? Seems like all the Ivy League places could donate? Maybe they already do. I suggest that if the management team at Mozilla were actually good at their jobs maybe MDN would already me profitable. I'd also suggest that it's in browser manufacturer's interest to provide documentation. If MDN disappears something will fill that void. Maybe it's time for a change. If all else fails, just slap everything into a man page.

garrison 6y ago

It sounds like MDN could benefit from being the work of a 501(c)(6) business league, which is how the Linux Foundation's work is funded. Money could initially come from the big existing browser vendors. It is in everyone's interest to see it continue.