15 ms·

> The other areas we have had to scale back on staffing and programs include: Mozilla developer programs, developer events and advocacy, and our MDN tech writin

by ary 6y ago

> The other areas we have had to scale back on staffing and programs include: Mozilla developer programs, developer events and advocacy, and our MDN tech writing. > We recognize that our tech writing staff drive a great deal of value to MDN users, as do partner contributions to the content. So we are working on a plan to keep the content up to date. The stated rationale for the "re-org" (read, layoffs) was to shore up the financials and explore new revenue opportunities. Here is a novel idea that I will provide at no cost: Charge for access to MDN, structure the legal particulars so that revenue goes to pay the tech writing staff, covers operating costs, and provides the excess to the Mozilla Foundation. Use the resulting goodwill and attention as a lead generation mechanism for whatever other projects Mozilla tries to create and charge for. Market validation you say? People won't pay for documentation you say? The sole developer of the macOS app Dash[1] makes a fairly decent living selling an app that merely allows you to search freely available documentation offline. MDN has real value that people, myself included, will pay for. Just this week I have referred to MDN documentation at least a couple of hundred times. Charge. Money. For. MDN. And pay the tech writers. [1] https://kapeli.com/dash https://kapeli.com/dash Edit: wording correction.

kissgyorgy 6y ago
This is the exact comment I wanted to make. I rarely use MDN, but would pay for it anyway, because when I need it, I really need it and there is no high quality alternative.
- eli 6y ago
  You could probably donate to Mozilla Foundation and earmark it for MDN today.
- dflock 6y ago
  I just found out that you _can_ directly pay for MDN: - Sponsor for $ a month: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ - Buy Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/ https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/
  - ary 6y ago
    Unfortunately it doesn't look like the sponsorship program is active anymore. All links 404.
Arubis 6y ago
I would pay for this as an individual. Competent organizations would pay for this in bulk.
rmorey 6y ago
regardless of this suggestion, thanks for linking Dash; this looks great
- uallo 6y ago
  There is also the open source https://devdocs.io/ https://devdocs.io/
  - Kye 6y ago
    Their web stuff comes from MDN.
ChrisSD 6y ago
That would explicitly go against Mozilla's goal of having an open web. A paywall for such a fundamental resource would not be a good thing. Perhaps there should be a more direct way for people and organizations to contribute money to the docs (or a paid App or other value add) but the docs themselves shouldn't be closed off.
- ary 6y ago
  > That would explicitly go against Mozilla's goal of having an open web. A paywall for such a fundamental resource would not be a good thing. It doesn't have to. The content could remain out in the open. Although you are correct in that I am suggesting a paywall there are other ways this could work: - Subscribers could set MDN project priorities in terms of which technologies get focus, topic expansion, expanded example code, etc. - Early access to incomplete documentation could be given to subscribers. - Issues with documentation or example code coming from subscribers could get priority treatment. - Offline versions of the documentation could be subscriber exclusive. The bottom line is that a tragedy of the commons situation needs to be avoided. Is a paywall really worse than letting bit-rot settle in on the existing MDN content?
  - ChrisSD 6y ago
    Some of the beneficiaries of MDN are amongst the biggest companies in tech. They can afford to spare some loose change if need be. There's no need to lockout the poor teenagers who are wanting to explore web tech for themselves.
  - burkaman 6y ago
    I would also pay for it for nothing extra at all. Give paying members a special icon on the MDN discourse or something. Maybe a "Sponsored By" page you can get your name on if you want it there. I pay for non-profit news that is free to all, I pay for some apps that have basically identical free versions. Please take my money! Offering a free product doesn't mean you're not allowed to ask for support.
khalilravanna 6y ago
Absolutely. I’d be willing to bet many thousands of developers would pay at least $5/mo for access (sign me up!). That’s at least 1 full time well-paid tech writer. And I think my estimate is highly conservative 1) I’m sure it could be more than $5 and 2) I didn’t include any corporate payments. My build on this: Mozilla, send out a poll and see if this is something people would thrown down $$$ for.
- mgbmtl 6y ago
  Would you pay $5/mo to support it, even if it were fully public? or only if it goes private? I'm pretty sure a "good enough" alternative would pickup the visibility, such as w3schools, and many won't be able to justify the expense of there isn't some kind of exclusivity. (there could be some sort of member/sponsor program, but having tried to run those, they have alot of overhead)
  - sseppola 6y ago
    Only if it stays public. It was hugely important for me learning web dev, still is, and I would like it to continue to be for everyone entering the profession
- dflock 6y ago
  There are two existing ways to pay for MDN, that are so well hidden that I only just found out about them: - Sponsor for $ a month: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ - Buy Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/ https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/
downvoteme1 6y ago
I think you have misconceptions around how much people want to pay for documentation . Usually people come across MDN docs while googling for some keyword . At times MDN is the first search result, but if the users hit a paywall, they will gladly go to the next search result - usually w3schools . It is not a definitive resource but is good enough for most general use cases. As an example , Wikipedia is used much more than MDN docs as everybody in the world can find something useful on Wikipedia but MDN docs appeal only to web developers . Yet every year; Wikipedia has a hard time gathering donations to run their site with a skeletal crew and they have to resort to huge banner messages exhorting users to donate.
- ary 6y ago
  What exists on MDN today is easily worth more to an individual than they pay (in U.S. dollars) for a single coffee in a month. Putting that towards a monthly subscription for a vital resource might not come naturally to people given the present "culture of free" on the Internet, but someone has to be first.
- therealjumbo 6y ago
  Wikipedia doesn't "need" to appeal to users for donations. They currently have more money than they'll ever need to develop wiki and to run wikipedia. They do that so they can add more staff and more projects. Which is a mistake IMO, they should stay focused on what they do well, in turn they need a smaller amount of money every year, and because of that they could take their current principal stuff it in a trust fund, and fund themselves virtually forever. Of course Mozilla could have/should have done the same thing: stay focused on the browser, forget all the other crap like FirefoxOS and save money to put in a trust fund and eventually achieve some org level financial freedom. That wouldn't be as cool tho. Mozilla's contract with google was just renewed, and is roughly the same amount of money they were making before. COVID had essentially no impact on their finances, and this is all corporate PR bullshit.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mdoms 6y ago
We have seen time and time again that there is a vast chasm between the number of people who say they will pay for a resource and the number of people who actually do so, when the rubber meets the road.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  This is actually quite apparent on HN. There's a train you can follow. At the head of the train, going choo choo, is "I would pay $5 for this". The rest of the cars go like this: - Oh, but not if I have to use Paypal - Oh, but not if I have to use a credit card - Oh, but not if I have to use a trackable payment system - Bitcoin is trackable, Monero or never - So I have to go through KYC just to pay Mozilla? No fucking way - 100% of the money should go to tech writers - Money is fungible, so how do I know they aren't just taking out other money to send this there - Ever since Pocket, I've changed my mind - Ever since Brendan Eich, I've changed my mind - How is it fair that both the tech writer who wrote 20% of the content and the new guy get the same amount from donations? - If DevTools isn't included there's no point - If DevTools is included there's no point And then, in the end, one guy gives like $5/month because he wants to prove to himself that he was honest. In fact, I'll tell you what: if 50 people reply to this comment pledging $60/yr ($5/month), I'll have someone set up a GoFundMe with a goal of $120k/year to fund one technical writer full time (and his associated payroll taxes etc.). I'll match that with $5k of my own money and I'll handle full comms with Mozilla to try to get them to hire someone. So validation is 2.5% of the final sum. Show me. EDIT: By the way if it hits 50 many days after (when I won't be notified), my email is in my profile if you want to prod.
  - reroute1 6y ago
    Shut up retard no on cares about your stupid patreon idea
  - karmelapple 6y ago
    Pledged.
  - _mkef 6y ago
    Pledged Skip to the point and set up a patron , as a node dev I would not able to do my job without MDN.
choward 6y ago
> Charge. Money. For. MDN. Sure, put up another barrier for those trying to learn web development.
- axaxs 6y ago
  So you want to use others' hard work for your own financial gain? That doesn't seem overly fair. I get your point, in a perfect world folks like you might land a nice job and kick back 10k as a thanks. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen, so alternatives are necessary.
mattlondon 6y ago
For what it is worth, I know that as much as I find MDN useful today I recognise that I would personally find it extremely hard to justify to myself for paying for it. And I do front end dev professionally and also for fun so I guess I might be the "target market"? It will just end up like the news sites with a paywall - "oh the want me to pay <clicks back and goes to next search result while moaning about why Google even includes these paywall sites in results> I bet I am not alone - it is just a reference and any other site can cobble together some examples that 99% of visitors just want to copy-paste anyway so they can get back to their work or fix that weird error (e.g. w3schools) There are also questions in my mind about who would pay: the industry veteran who remembers the days before we had developer tools, or the person just starting out who doesn't really know anything yet? Or someone else? Neither the veteran or the newbie would get much value out of that $5 in my mind, leaving only a hollow rump of the middle-ground of people who care enough to pay for access, but also don't care enough to learn so that they won't actually need the subscription? It doesn't make sense. MDN will drop down the search rankings and some other site will provide reference material for DOM + JavaScript.
wilde 6y ago
Charging for access goes against the mission of democratizing access to this info. Corporate sponsorships seem like a good idea though.
b34r 6y ago
I would totally pay monthly/yearly for MDN
lol768 6y ago
> Charge for access to MDN, structure the legal particulars so that revenue goes to pay the tech writing staff, covers operating costs, and provides the excess to the Mozilla Foundation. Use the resulting goodwill and attention as a lead generation mechanism for whatever other projects Mozilla tries to create and charge for. This doesn't sit very well with me, as someone who has written a few security-related articles on MDN and generally tries to contribute to e.g. the compat-data repository as I get time. I'm motivated, just as I would be with an OSS PR, by the work being high quality and freely accessible to all. It's a wiki. Anyone can help contribute. Do the professional technical writers do an excellent job as changes land in Firefox? Yes. Is it fair to charge for access to contributions that both the paid technical writers and the community have contributed under the impression that this is a free resource in the public domain? I'm not sure. Is there a middle ground whereby we can still fund hosting/maintenance/professional technical writing but give access to a) folks who perhaps otherwise wouldn't have the means to pay for the documentation and b) folks who've contributed to the resource? Perhaps.
hvis 6y ago
I don't think it's a great idea. Some commercial model would be ideal, but having a paywall would mean that the influence of MDN on the large web developer community will become than much smaller. That would mean less developers having easy access to information that would help create write solid, browser-agnostic websites and applications. Which will be a loss for everyone. Except, perhaps, for Google and the Chrome team, as the makers of the currently dominant web browser.

by ary 6y ago

kissgyorgy 6y ago

This is the exact comment I wanted to make. I rarely use MDN, but would pay for it anyway, because when I need it, I really need it and there is no high quality alternative.

eli 6y ago
You could probably donate to Mozilla Foundation and earmark it for MDN today.
dflock 6y ago
I just found out that you _can_ directly pay for MDN: - Sponsor for $ a month: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ - Buy Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/ https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/
- ary 6y ago
  Unfortunately it doesn't look like the sponsorship program is active anymore. All links 404.

Arubis 6y ago

I would pay for this as an individual. Competent organizations would pay for this in bulk.

rmorey 6y ago

regardless of this suggestion, thanks for linking Dash; this looks great

uallo 6y ago
There is also the open source https://devdocs.io/ https://devdocs.io/
- Kye 6y ago
  Their web stuff comes from MDN.

ChrisSD 6y ago

That would explicitly go against Mozilla's goal of having an open web. A paywall for such a fundamental resource would not be a good thing. Perhaps there should be a more direct way for people and organizations to contribute money to the docs (or a paid App or other value add) but the docs themselves shouldn't be closed off.

ary 6y ago
> That would explicitly go against Mozilla's goal of having an open web. A paywall for such a fundamental resource would not be a good thing. It doesn't have to. The content could remain out in the open. Although you are correct in that I am suggesting a paywall there are other ways this could work: - Subscribers could set MDN project priorities in terms of which technologies get focus, topic expansion, expanded example code, etc. - Early access to incomplete documentation could be given to subscribers. - Issues with documentation or example code coming from subscribers could get priority treatment. - Offline versions of the documentation could be subscriber exclusive. The bottom line is that a tragedy of the commons situation needs to be avoided. Is a paywall really worse than letting bit-rot settle in on the existing MDN content?
- ChrisSD 6y ago
  Some of the beneficiaries of MDN are amongst the biggest companies in tech. They can afford to spare some loose change if need be. There's no need to lockout the poor teenagers who are wanting to explore web tech for themselves.
- burkaman 6y ago
  I would also pay for it for nothing extra at all. Give paying members a special icon on the MDN discourse or something. Maybe a "Sponsored By" page you can get your name on if you want it there. I pay for non-profit news that is free to all, I pay for some apps that have basically identical free versions. Please take my money! Offering a free product doesn't mean you're not allowed to ask for support.

khalilravanna 6y ago

Absolutely. I’d be willing to bet many thousands of developers would pay at least $5/mo for access (sign me up!). That’s at least 1 full time well-paid tech writer. And I think my estimate is highly conservative 1) I’m sure it could be more than $5 and 2) I didn’t include any corporate payments. My build on this: Mozilla, send out a poll and see if this is something people would thrown down $$$ for.

mgbmtl 6y ago
Would you pay $5/mo to support it, even if it were fully public? or only if it goes private? I'm pretty sure a "good enough" alternative would pickup the visibility, such as w3schools, and many won't be able to justify the expense of there isn't some kind of exclusivity. (there could be some sort of member/sponsor program, but having tried to run those, they have alot of overhead)
- sseppola 6y ago
  Only if it stays public. It was hugely important for me learning web dev, still is, and I would like it to continue to be for everyone entering the profession
dflock 6y ago
There are two existing ways to pay for MDN, that are so well hidden that I only just found out about them: - Sponsor for $ a month: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/ - Buy Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/ https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/

downvoteme1 6y ago

I think you have misconceptions around how much people want to pay for documentation . Usually people come across MDN docs while googling for some keyword . At times MDN is the first search result, but if the users hit a paywall, they will gladly go to the next search result - usually w3schools . It is not a definitive resource but is good enough for most general use cases. As an example , Wikipedia is used much more than MDN docs as everybody in the world can find something useful on Wikipedia but MDN docs appeal only to web developers . Yet every year; Wikipedia has a hard time gathering donations to run their site with a skeletal crew and they have to resort to huge banner messages exhorting users to donate.

ary 6y ago
What exists on MDN today is easily worth more to an individual than they pay (in U.S. dollars) for a single coffee in a month. Putting that towards a monthly subscription for a vital resource might not come naturally to people given the present "culture of free" on the Internet, but someone has to be first.
therealjumbo 6y ago
Wikipedia doesn't "need" to appeal to users for donations. They currently have more money than they'll ever need to develop wiki and to run wikipedia. They do that so they can add more staff and more projects. Which is a mistake IMO, they should stay focused on what they do well, in turn they need a smaller amount of money every year, and because of that they could take their current principal stuff it in a trust fund, and fund themselves virtually forever. Of course Mozilla could have/should have done the same thing: stay focused on the browser, forget all the other crap like FirefoxOS and save money to put in a trust fund and eventually achieve some org level financial freedom. That wouldn't be as cool tho. Mozilla's contract with google was just renewed, and is roughly the same amount of money they were making before. COVID had essentially no impact on their finances, and this is all corporate PR bullshit.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mdoms 6y ago

We have seen time and time again that there is a vast chasm between the number of people who say they will pay for a resource and the number of people who actually do so, when the rubber meets the road.

renewiltord 6y ago
This is actually quite apparent on HN. There's a train you can follow. At the head of the train, going choo choo, is "I would pay $5 for this". The rest of the cars go like this: - Oh, but not if I have to use Paypal - Oh, but not if I have to use a credit card - Oh, but not if I have to use a trackable payment system - Bitcoin is trackable, Monero or never - So I have to go through KYC just to pay Mozilla? No fucking way - 100% of the money should go to tech writers - Money is fungible, so how do I know they aren't just taking out other money to send this there - Ever since Pocket, I've changed my mind - Ever since Brendan Eich, I've changed my mind - How is it fair that both the tech writer who wrote 20% of the content and the new guy get the same amount from donations? - If DevTools isn't included there's no point - If DevTools is included there's no point And then, in the end, one guy gives like $5/month because he wants to prove to himself that he was honest. In fact, I'll tell you what: if 50 people reply to this comment pledging $60/yr ($5/month), I'll have someone set up a GoFundMe with a goal of $120k/year to fund one technical writer full time (and his associated payroll taxes etc.). I'll match that with $5k of my own money and I'll handle full comms with Mozilla to try to get them to hire someone. So validation is 2.5% of the final sum. Show me. EDIT: By the way if it hits 50 many days after (when I won't be notified), my email is in my profile if you want to prod.
- reroute1 6y ago
  Shut up retard no on cares about your stupid patreon idea
- karmelapple 6y ago
  Pledged.
- _mkef 6y ago
  Pledged Skip to the point and set up a patron , as a node dev I would not able to do my job without MDN.

choward 6y ago

> Charge. Money. For. MDN. Sure, put up another barrier for those trying to learn web development.

axaxs 6y ago
So you want to use others' hard work for your own financial gain? That doesn't seem overly fair. I get your point, in a perfect world folks like you might land a nice job and kick back 10k as a thanks. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen, so alternatives are necessary.

mattlondon 6y ago

For what it is worth, I know that as much as I find MDN useful today I recognise that I would personally find it extremely hard to justify to myself for paying for it. And I do front end dev professionally and also for fun so I guess I might be the "target market"? It will just end up like the news sites with a paywall - "oh the want me to pay <clicks back and goes to next search result while moaning about why Google even includes these paywall sites in results> I bet I am not alone - it is just a reference and any other site can cobble together some examples that 99% of visitors just want to copy-paste anyway so they can get back to their work or fix that weird error (e.g. w3schools) There are also questions in my mind about who would pay: the industry veteran who remembers the days before we had developer tools, or the person just starting out who doesn't really know anything yet? Or someone else? Neither the veteran or the newbie would get much value out of that $5 in my mind, leaving only a hollow rump of the middle-ground of people who care enough to pay for access, but also don't care enough to learn so that they won't actually need the subscription? It doesn't make sense. MDN will drop down the search rankings and some other site will provide reference material for DOM + JavaScript.

wilde 6y ago

Charging for access goes against the mission of democratizing access to this info. Corporate sponsorships seem like a good idea though.

b34r 6y ago

I would totally pay monthly/yearly for MDN

lol768 6y ago

> Charge for access to MDN, structure the legal particulars so that revenue goes to pay the tech writing staff, covers operating costs, and provides the excess to the Mozilla Foundation. Use the resulting goodwill and attention as a lead generation mechanism for whatever other projects Mozilla tries to create and charge for. This doesn't sit very well with me, as someone who has written a few security-related articles on MDN and generally tries to contribute to e.g. the compat-data repository as I get time. I'm motivated, just as I would be with an OSS PR, by the work being high quality and freely accessible to all. It's a wiki. Anyone can help contribute. Do the professional technical writers do an excellent job as changes land in Firefox? Yes. Is it fair to charge for access to contributions that both the paid technical writers and the community have contributed under the impression that this is a free resource in the public domain? I'm not sure. Is there a middle ground whereby we can still fund hosting/maintenance/professional technical writing but give access to a) folks who perhaps otherwise wouldn't have the means to pay for the documentation and b) folks who've contributed to the resource? Perhaps.

hvis 6y ago

I don't think it's a great idea. Some commercial model would be ideal, but having a paywall would mean that the influence of MDN on the large web developer community will become than much smaller. That would mean less developers having easy access to information that would help create write solid, browser-agnostic websites and applications. Which will be a loss for everyone. Except, perhaps, for Google and the Chrome team, as the makers of the currently dominant web browser.