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.
- 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.
Skip to the point and set up a patron , as a node dev I would not able to do my job without MDN.
god, I _wish_
There was no path toward that number without moving to what were considered "technical" roles on other teams, including when I moved into a tools development role within the tech writing team.
So I wish I, or anyone I've worked with, or any full-time technical writer I've ever spoken to, got that level of compensation for technical writing. I'd still be doing it if I'd gotten paid that much.
I'm not saying nobody gets paid that, someone probably does or I'm sure y'all wouldn't talk about it. But god I _wish_ I'd ever actually seen it, just to know it was out there.
Mozilla is sitting on $500M cash reserves + $500M / year from Google. Don't assign lack of money as the real reason of MDN falling: lack of product direction and leadership.
If you really love MDN or whatever then why not fork it and pay for hosting its competitor. Just import all the pages to Mediawiki and put it up online.
As a freelance frontend developer, you only have to calculate how little you have to work to get this $60/year. So it's a no-brainer for such a valuable resource as MDN
Love MDN, it's absolutely been some of the most valuable documentation I've been privileged to have access to during my career.
But also, for the 1st part, LOL! (IMO, HN needs to learn to laugh at itself from time-to-time.)
And also, for the 2nd part, thank you for organizing this. Because I'm bootstrapping for my retirement fund, I'm not particularly flush for cash, and so too often I'm a freeloader. This is great though - I hope you get it together.
One final thought is that Mozilla executives don't really deserve to be the custodians of MDN anymore, and so perhaps as a community we need to be looking for ways to liberate MDN from Mozilla. For example, the technical writer, rather than being a Mozilla employee, could be an independent MDN contributor collaborating with Mozillla employees, and contributing under CC-BY-SA 2.5. [0]
Whatever financial/operational reasons there were for the recent cutbacks, the current situation of MDN (and Firefox) confirms my doubt and distrust of the leadership and management. It's been terrible for their reputation.
Of course, as a for-profit, they're free to prioritize business and financial sustainability. But the decisions they implemented - and how they went about it - seemed to have no respect for what makes Mozilla actually valuable (not just in terms of profit, but in social good and long-term role in the market).
They should have started by eliminating the bloat from the top, instead of laying off hard-working teams, experts and specialists that produced the real value.
In the end, if these projects can adapt and survive, it might turn out to be a good thing, to become more community-supported and independent of Mozilla. On the other hand, it seems natural for Google or Microsoft to swoop in as "evangelists of the open web" and take these projects under their (massively funded) wings.