A little bit scary but also possibly cool. Scary because freemium and paywall go hand in hand; cool because "technical deep dives by experts" sounds good.
They should have been paid out of the advertising budget of Mozilla if someone there had the insight that no other campaign that they could have run with that money would have furthered the goodwill of web developers towards Mozilla/Firefox more than MDN did.
With all the uncountable billions of dollars in the banks of Apple, Microsoft, Google etc, none of them can manage to come up with documentation to compete with MDN which has to go freemium to be viable.
Presumably that’s because they can’t link your identity to it or something, making it nit worthwhile doing.
Apple: “we’re a hardware company, it’s not our job to document the web”
Microsoft: “Internet Explorer failed, it’s not our job to document the web”
Google : “we’re a advertising company, it’s not our job to document the web”.
I believe they've also been contributing to the docs themselves since Google shut down their own effort (may have just been a section of web.dev?) a few years back.
That's assuming that those companies want outside developers to be knowledgeable. That's a questionable assumption. If anyone here remembers how old Microsoft used to operate and why people went to get MS-something certificates you know what I mean.
"Free" documentation is often designed to give you barely enough info to start using their products, but not much more. And we're kind of used to this by now. MDN, FreeBSD hanbook or the original set of Smalltalk books stand as exceptions and reminders what things could look like if motivations were different.
I was using a WebRTC feature just yesterday that is listed as supported by Safari in modern versions of iOS all over the web. I can tell you for certain that it is 100% not.
Yes, there are bugs in it that I don’t think are documented anywhere. We do have working video calling on mSafari, but we’re actively trying to kill that dependency.
I wonder if MDN would be better served by branching out of Mozilla's grasp and becoming its own independent MDN Web Fondation or something. Mozilla seems to have a poor track record of maintaining anything as we saw when they fired most of the people working on MDN and other engineers despite being able to sell licenses to special editions of Firefox or other things like email, the whole non-profit Mozilla vs for profit Mozilla structure is just awful.
MDN is its only gem left outside of Firefox itself, it's good they're doing this though, but only if all proceeds go primarily towards MDN itself. I can foresee people unsubscribing over funding issues if they find out Mozilla foundation is just pocketing profits from this for things outside of MDN.
>despite being able to sell licenses to special editions of Firefox or other things like email
In 2021, there is not a chance in hell that any significant number of people are going to pay money for their web browser. At best (and this is very optimistic) it might make a few million dollars from dedicated HN-types, which is nowhere close to what Google gives them.
I actually would pay money for a Mozilla-branded email service, but running an email service isn't a walk in the park, and I expect all of the typical people would be complaining about Mozilla spending time and money on something that isn't Firefox, regardless of whether it's profitable (see also: all the complaining about Pocket).
Honestly, I wish that Mozilla had acquired Scroll (rather than Twitter) and started pushing it harder. That would be very in-line with their goals as an organization, and might eventually become a significant revenue source.
Scroll probably would have worked well with Pocket because the former could have increased user engagement (and, in turn, help better/newer stories end up in the top posts/popular category) while in the latter support for some paywalled content-providers could be added under a single subscription system.
Weird idea - since these big companies all voluntarily stopped documenting in favor of MDN, perhaps they should pay Mozilla for this (it's saving them money, after all).
If Mozilla is still having to do a paid option - MDN Plus - they are obviously not getting enough. Looks like around the price of one employee for the top funders.
Unless Mozilla is suddenly operating for profit and following the ol' "why get some of the money when you can get all of the money" business model.
You're thinking of the Mozilla Foundation, which is not-for-profit. The Foundation owns the Mozilla Corporation, which is "for-profit" and develops Firefox and MDN.
Money flows from the Corporation to the Foundation every year.
That's not the entire story. Google still has web.dev, which blurs the line between "web platform" features and Google-specific or "experimental" features. Neither of the two actively promote MDN either (web.dev doesn't mention it even where it would make sense).
This doesn't seem as much of an intentional decision of the two corporations to promote MDN as an independent resource but more likely the result of developers working for these companies refusing to compete with MDN.
Btw, Google does create a lot of content on web development (ex on webrtc.org, web.dev, html5rocks.com etc) including on various youtube GDG channels and release quite a bit of OSS reference implementations too.
I strongly dislike the idea. It reduces deep knowledge to people who can pay for it. The web should be open for anyone. (yeah, Its already not like this, I know)
> Nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs content — this content will continue to be free and available to everyone. We want to provide extra value through premium content and features to help make MDN self-sustaining, on a completely opt-in basis. Again, nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs!
Are there any studies about how long the corporate “nothing is changing” line actually holds true? My gut says maybe 18-24 months? Perhaps I’m cynical but I see “nothing is changing” and I can’t help but assume a change is all but inevitable and they’re just going to slow walk me to it.
As far as I understand, the MDN documenting the standard (HTML5, CSS, etc.) will stay freely accessible as it is. I prefer this than having trackers & ads on the site... which would be completely contrary to their values anyway.
This false equivalence between MBA degrees and poor management really has to stop. It's a pretty bigoted take and I'm always disappointed to see that on HN, even though I half expect it coming into most threads these days.
In all seriousness though, the MBA in and of itself isn't necessarily "bad". However, the "maximize shareholder value" mantra and the sheer volume of MBA's invading a company are the problem. There are so many now, every one of them looking for a way to appear valuable. The training cements this ever-increasing desire to wring more productivity and efficiency from an organization; the long-term effects of which are usually user-hostile. But it's a slow strangulation, so it never appears immediately sinister to anybody unless they've seen it happen before.
People are starting to come around to this, and coupled with the sheer volume of MBA's it's become a meme of sorts. It seems to me these days that "not all MBAs are greedy pricks, but all greedy pricks are MBAs".
Nothing is stopping people from writing their own articles on other sites for free. Developers aren't owed free articles to read, and if people want to be compensated for the time spent writing articles, then they should be.
Agreed. Normally I wouldn't be that surprised at this, but I thought of Mozilla as a nonprofit that wouldn't just gatekeep access to some information to those that have the money to pay for it (Could someone in Iran or Cuba even pay for this if they wanted?)
On the flip side, corporations that make a ton of money off of this information, rarely, if ever, voluntarily pay for it. It's a hard problem to solve.
EU should sponsor directly the contributors of open-source software without any middleman. A contributor can switch companies like socks, giving money to corporations is pointless. Also, contributors have to apply to be granted funds. The EU can't really babysit.
Sure, but it's not EU's _job_ to fully fund Mozilla. And since when the European Union has to give money to an American corporation? Last I checked the USA is the biggest economy in the world, and incidentally where Mozilla, inc. is legally based.
Or should they buy it from a corrupt current management? :)
Another way would be to establish a EU-funded foundation that would fork Firefox. But EU has a poor track record for this. Anybody remember EU-backed Google killer? And forking major open source projects has a bunch of issues too.
If Mozilla was a european non-profit I would agree it would be great to have EU funding. But a foreign organization where the management are extracting millions and millions of dollars for questionable performance at best while firing vast amounts of employees? No way.
I agree. I'd like EU to sponsors Firefox development, but not by directly sponsoring Mozilla itself, especially not the Mozilla Foundation. Reducing reliance on Google and having people whose jobs is to challenge the hegemony of Google and Apple on web standards would be really nice.
"The government" isn't deciding who gets funds. The EU has public funding programmes and grants and you can apply to them if you meet the requirements:
I can't think of any programme that would work for Mozilla though, especially given they're a US-based for-profit company wrapped around a US-based non-profit.
The purpose of these programmes is typically to either contribute to regional development that is in the EU member states' interest, or to help implement policies the EU has passed. There are arguments to be made about how well the member states' (or their citizens') interests are represented in the EU's electoral structure, or how effective these programmes are in general, but saying this is "the government deciding who gets funds" is absurd.
The EU should definitely contribute to the Open Web Docs org, which seems to be the financial body for the MDN Web Docs specifically. The EU has been paying grants for less useful projects than this.
Mozilla, though, not so much. Given the ridiculous paychecks its C-level management has been caching in the midst of the massive layouts that cannibalized most of its most promising projects (including MDN staff), I don't think funding is the primary problem holding them back right now.
I like their approach. Out of all possible options for funding, they managed to keep the core available, independent of other commercial influences, and offer extra quality content to subscribers. This could've gone bad in so many ways, but I'm hopeful for the project's future.
>Nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs content — this content will continue to be free and available to everyone. We want to provide extra value through premium content and features to help make MDN self-sustaining, on a completely opt-in basis. Again, nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs!
Even the copy suggests you're better off not getting this, waiting at least a year for the content to be posted "every month," then subbing for a single month to read it all.
Maybe the Wikipedia/donation model would have been a better play for MDN then this, particularly as freemium was originally about micro-transactions, not $2 more than the cost of Netflix's Basic tier.
Now it falls into the uncanny valley of: Too "product" to be a donation, and not really enough of a product to be a real product.
This really looks more like something to get companies to just shell out for. "Oh, you all already use MDN every day for your documentation? Sure, we'll pay for MDN Plus and get a nice bulk discount."
It seems to be an A/B test, it's $5/m on my side. Which seems fair to me, although I agree about the product angle; I don't care at all about extra content or features, I'd rather just pay to keep MDN going and have everything available to everyone.
I'm surprised by this model being so consumer focused. I think if they offered some kind of enterprise plan where my team could share and highlight critical sections, configure our official support matrix and such, I'd be willing to pony up a few hundred a year from my budget.
I think they're targeting this at the kind of people who are almost happy to donate money to MDN just to see it continue.
The exclusive content just seems like a way of pushing would-be donors over the edge.
It's sort of similar to LWN. The articles are top notch but available for free after a delay (likewise, anything truly useful on MDN+ will leak out on to other platforms). People who subscribe to LWN just want to support the efforts and make sure the content continues to flow, they're not really concerned with the exclusivity of getting it first.
$5 a month when I'm using my regular web browser (chrome), $10 a month when I'm using private navigation. $10 a month on Firefox too. Maybe because I'm in Europe and it's adjusted to salaries/cost of living?
This isn't what is happening here which is a simple A/B test. But the adjustment you mention can be implemented utilizing the purchasing power parity. It'll be nice seeing projects taking this into consideration.
At first glance, this feels a little distasteful. I've always thought of the MDN docs like Wikipedia; a non-profit public resource. Attempting to monetize it feels... wrong somehow.
So long as the docs themselves remain under CC-BY-SA though guess it's not really a problem. The premium features they currently offer seem reasonable, and if things ever get too out of hand the community could always just move to another site. It also doesn't sound like something I'd pay for though, so not sure how successful it'll be.
On the positive side, more funding to maintain MDN could turn out to be a good thing in the long term. I guess we'll have to see.
I don't really understand how offering better content against money is worse than asking for money regularly like Wikipedia does (especially when they seem to just consume more and more money).
A paywall shuts out financially disadvantaged groups and limits the circulation of knowledge. Donations don’t, however annoying the banners are.
Whether overly abundant donations are misallocated is a completely orthogonal issue.
Note that I’m not saying we are entitled to anything; but slapping the MDN brand on a premium subscription service does tarnish the original brand a little.
But as far as I understand the source article, MDN Plus is not a paywall to the type of content that is already on MDN. What's going to be behind a paywall are a kind of technical essays which are not currently on MDN and some convenience features.
On the other hand a paywall may mean that people writing content are the one that gets the money, which creates an healthier ecosystem that doesn't depend on donation of money or time (as opposed to wikipedia).
Wikipedia misallocating funds does tarnish the original brand a lot, especially when most people that contribute content are doing it for free.
> Wikipedia misallocating funds does tarnish the original brand a lot
Which has nothing to do the donation model.
Wikimedia can pay full time content writers if they want to.
Mozilla can also use the subscription income to pay CEO comp if they want to.
Allocation of funds has close to nothing to do with the acquisition of funds, unless the acquisition comes with a specific mandate, which neither Wikipedia donations nor the subscription service here has.
That's assuming that revenue from MDN plus will go only to fund more premium content.
I don't think that is true (maybe I missed something from their page?), which means they will always have the incentive to make more premium content in order to generate more revenue, especially if they need it to cover the expenses.
Because there are tons of people who cannot pay for services like this (lower class, students, third-world countries, etc), and learning how to build and deploy technology is powerful leverage to improving their quality of life.
I mean it's not like web development tutorials and blogs haven't filled the internet with free content for years to learn everything you could possibly want. freecodecamp will take you from nothing to hirable, for free.
There's much more to technology than websites. Those people have more important issues to worry about than access to MDN and they're not the responsibility of Mozilla either.
I think this is the right step to take for things like this. There are massive corporations with cash galore that use open source and publicly available resources and rarely give anything back. With MDN Plus, there's a chance now that devs at these companies will get their company to pay the subscription. We need more programs like this.
yeah a bit the same but if they need money to keep valuable operations like MDN going then making a way to get some cash this way doesn't bother me more than that
On a long enough timeline, all free and libre services done out of the good will and charitable efforts of contributors and maintainers, will eventually succumb to some sort of monetization strategy. I know in my case, and last time I checked, I don't work for free.
Mozilla fired the people working on this because it was not a revenue stream. How is that surprising?
The Mozilla Corporation exists to partially make money just like any other corporation. How can HN both complain when Mozilla sheds dead weight, but also diversifies revenue?
Mozilla shepherded MDN into the hands of the community quite well imo. They busted their butt to make the content easy to contribute to through GitHub.
Please have some perspective on situations instead of "Hur dur Mozilla fired these people".
MDN should be a separate company. Personally, I'm no longer interested in supporting Mozilla in any capacity. Their management behaves in a way that's consistent with the idea that it's barely more than controlled opposition to Google's Chrome team.
I don't get how the company had the head-count it did for so long and didn't even manage to tread water in relation to other browsers, for about a decade, let alone do anything new or interesting. Which parts were valuable and interesting? Rust/Servo, and MDN. Which parts get cut? Those.
I'd love to see them make a come-back, but it's been so damn long and they're showing so many strongly negative signs that I think they're long since rotted beyond hope, organizationally. Better they're replaced. I don't think they're an organization capable of replacing themselves with a better upstart of their own making, as Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox did to the Mozilla browser, nor of innovating—Pocket and a VPN service are their innovative monetization and self-sufficiency efforts. Not leaping into any number of promising avenues for web services that would benefit from having an open-source-friendly but well-capitalized backer offering a paid version with a built-in audience to push the Web and potentially the Internet forward, but... Pocket and a VPN. How do you miss the boat that badly? How many teams building the sorts of things Firefox should have been (Signal, Matrix, Gemini, IPFS, various open-source social network efforts like Mastodon, et c.) are small enough to comfortably fit within the Firefox org? Several, I imagine.
Their last big performance breakthrough was, IIRC, "now merely wastes as much battery as Chrome, which is itself notoriously wasteful". That after years of eating battery like mad.
I find hiding all of these articles behind a walled garden a little distasteful. I remember the times when I couldn't have afforded access to such information. Back then, this kind of stuff would have been published in a magazine, and that magazine would have been on the rack of my local bookstore, where I could have flipped through it to decide if it was worth my money.
That magazine would have charged a subscription fee right?
You can "flip" through MDN's other (free) articles, or the excerpts they've provided here to decide if it's worth your money.
How is reading free content on your phone harder than walking to a bookstore? (Also this seems like a paywall, not a walled garden.)
I remember those times too, but there were no magazines for me to flip through to learn CSS float-based/table-based layouts. I had to look at ::shudders:: W3Schools.
> I find hiding all of these articles behind a walled garden a little distasteful.
Did you click the link? The second blob of text, above the fold and not easy to miss:
> Nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs content — this content will continue to be free and available to everyone. We want to provide extra value through premium content and features to help make MDN self-sustaining, on a completely opt-in basis. Again, nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs!
The experience you describe at the bookstore mirrors the proposed experience for MDN Plus rather well, actually.
I'm a long time MDN and Firefox user but I'm struggling to see the benefit of this beyond one free article a month? all of the other "features" are trivial without the subscription (bookmarks, save as pdf...). Seems like a very weak offering.
It feels like this could have landed with a bit more punch and a more compelling sell and it could very well evolve into something very valuable but I can't see the appeal right now.
Another commenter mentioned $10 a month but I'm seeing $5 at the moment. Right now there's just no features I'd consider paying anything for. I would happily pay $5-$10 a month though for something more fleshed out, more regular high quality technical deep dives and some other benefits that justify a regular subscription.
Unless they intentionally break it somehow, my print dialog can already do that to any page.
Actually it's even easier: "file -> export to PDF" is an option in Safari. Saves a couple clicks.
I get the idea, but including that on the list of premium features is really weird. Are they just not going to provide a print stylesheet at all, unless you pay? Maybe that's it.
Obviously it would be nice if everything everywhere was always free, but docs and opensource suffer a lot from lack of sustainability when based on voluntary donations. Companies simply have no incentives to pay for anything.
There are surely tens of thousands of companies worldwide, whose employees rely on MDN on a daily basis. There are poor startups among them, but many of those companies have pretty deep pockets. If just a small percentage of those employees ask their bosses for this $5/mo. sub, this can improve things considerably. For now everything is free, so no one has an incentive, or a way, to pay.
As developers, we are collectively guilty for never asking our employees for anything which costs $$$. Many of us (me including) assume that asking for a few bucks sub is almost a crime. Or we don't want to deal with stupid bureaucracy and an arcane process to set up the sub.
Personally I hope the experiment will work. Let's see in a few months.
I think the best model would be something like: subscribers get the premium content immediately, other people with a few weeks/months delay. This would keep a healthy balance and keep the incentives in place for people to pay.
> Or we don't want to deal with stupid bureaucracy and an arcane process to set up the sub.
More like this IMO. There tends to be a lot of process with this sort of thing, which makes me reluctant to bother. Especially if I'll have to do it over and over again.
Everyone's suggesting lower price levels, but I'd suggest they have a higher enterprise price level. I bet a lot of medium-large corporations would pay a few thousand a year for all of their employees to have access to this new top-tier MDN plus. Would probably have to support the usual rigamarole of corporate POs and billing and tools to administer accounts with large numbers of users.
Glad to see they're including content and articles as well. I used to swear by MDN for HTML help, but ever since I bit the bullet and just read the HTML spec I find going directly to the (free) source a far better option. Not to mention there's a developer version of the spec that cuts out the implementor details and lets you focus on developer details.
But now they are competing with free content from Smashing and CSS-Tricks and lessons from a variety of free sources, including Google who has great course content.
I wasn't totally against this until I discovered the A/B testing thing with the subscription costs. Something about that stinks. Just name your price and I'll think about it, don't be shady about it.
They are naming different prices for different people.
You walk into a bar and the guy in front of you orders a beer for $5. Looks good, so you order the same thing. The bartender says, "For you it's $10." Do you feel fairly treated?
This is already happening for literally everything that you buy. And no, I don't care whether someone else paid less or more than me for something or got it for free. If I don't think the price is fair then I'll say no and move on.
They aren't charging people different amounts, they're testing waitlist signup interest at different amounts. Presumably once they gauge interest a single level will be applied to everyone.
In the mean time, people are being charged different amounts. They are literally charging different people different amounts. You might think that isn't a big deal, but how can you insist it isn't the case?
They're are not charging anything to anybody yet, you can get in the waitlist and answer a survey which explicitly asks if you think the price is to high, fair or to low.
Moreover next to the price there's a disclaimer that the "Price is subject to change".
To me it seems that they're just running an experiment to determine what's the price they should put to the service, which seems smart and correct.
If you sold ice cream on the street and needed to figure out how to become profitable, would you be so opposed to trying out selling at $5 one day and $7 the next? Or would this be too unfair to the people that paid $5?
It's the intent I guess. The bartender story seems to imply a bad reason for the discrepancy (some type of unfair discrimination), while in this case it's to find out if you can charge more to eg capture back more of the value people are getting from you. Which doesn't seem so bad.
Testing different prices on different days doesn't give you as much confidence (price sensitivity can vary by day of the week, weather, etc.).
Then there are tests that would be hard to run even on different days, like doubling your nominal price and splashing a "today only 50% off" or "buy one get one free" offer.
Real-world price testing is so much harder to pull off, it isn't as common, which is part of the reason web A/B tests seem jarring when the curtain is pulled back.
The price for every subscription you have was likely A/B tested. It's very standard and not shady.
Subscription prices vary by all types of audiences for subscription-based models, test segments are just one of them, and one of the least shady in my opinion. It's a brand new product and they're gauging the right price.
It is shady. I expect Amazon, Netflix and their like to do this. Mozilla is supposed to have more integrity, after all their mission is to "build a better internet" and "empower" people. Just because something is industry standard doesn't mean you have to do it as well, especially when you place yourself above others morally.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadLet's hope those voices follow through!
Presumably that’s because they can’t link your identity to it or something, making it nit worthwhile doing.
Apple: “we’re a hardware company, it’s not our job to document the web”
Microsoft: “Internet Explorer failed, it’s not our job to document the web”
Google : “we’re a advertising company, it’s not our job to document the web”.
Facebook... etc
Amazon ... etc
And so on ...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDN_Web_Docs
"Free" documentation is often designed to give you barely enough info to start using their products, but not much more. And we're kind of used to this by now. MDN, FreeBSD hanbook or the original set of Smalltalk books stand as exceptions and reminders what things could look like if motivations were different.
The point is that the MSDN documentation for HTML and IE was quite good, and then it was deprecated in favor of MDN's superior documentation.
Or, as everyone who's ever had to look at Apple's developer documentation knows, to document their own operating system APIs.
MDN is its only gem left outside of Firefox itself, it's good they're doing this though, but only if all proceeds go primarily towards MDN itself. I can foresee people unsubscribing over funding issues if they find out Mozilla foundation is just pocketing profits from this for things outside of MDN.
In 2021, there is not a chance in hell that any significant number of people are going to pay money for their web browser. At best (and this is very optimistic) it might make a few million dollars from dedicated HN-types, which is nowhere close to what Google gives them.
I actually would pay money for a Mozilla-branded email service, but running an email service isn't a walk in the park, and I expect all of the typical people would be complaining about Mozilla spending time and money on something that isn't Firefox, regardless of whether it's profitable (see also: all the complaining about Pocket).
Honestly, I wish that Mozilla had acquired Scroll (rather than Twitter) and started pushing it harder. That would be very in-line with their goals as an organization, and might eventually become a significant revenue source.
If https://servo.org/ is any measure. Probably not :(
People don't care about browsers until it's too late.
Unless Mozilla is suddenly operating for profit and following the ol' "why get some of the money when you can get all of the money" business model.
Money flows from the Corporation to the Foundation every year.
This doesn't seem as much of an intentional decision of the two corporations to promote MDN as an independent resource but more likely the result of developers working for these companies refusing to compete with MDN.
For now. Once you let the monetization genie out of the bottle, Death by a Thousand MBA's is almost certain.
In all seriousness though, the MBA in and of itself isn't necessarily "bad". However, the "maximize shareholder value" mantra and the sheer volume of MBA's invading a company are the problem. There are so many now, every one of them looking for a way to appear valuable. The training cements this ever-increasing desire to wring more productivity and efficiency from an organization; the long-term effects of which are usually user-hostile. But it's a slow strangulation, so it never appears immediately sinister to anybody unless they've seen it happen before.
People are starting to come around to this, and coupled with the sheer volume of MBA's it's become a meme of sorts. It seems to me these days that "not all MBAs are greedy pricks, but all greedy pricks are MBAs".
If I could, I'd pay Google 50$ a month directly to disable all of their advertising across all sites which use ad sense.
- https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
- https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-mozillas-layoffs-an...
Help out, sure. To fully fund them would be taking it too far.
Or should they buy it from a corrupt current management? :)
Another way would be to establish a EU-funded foundation that would fork Firefox. But EU has a poor track record for this. Anybody remember EU-backed Google killer? And forking major open source projects has a bunch of issues too.
https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/funding-grants_en
https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/find-funding/eu-fu...
I can't think of any programme that would work for Mozilla though, especially given they're a US-based for-profit company wrapped around a US-based non-profit.
The purpose of these programmes is typically to either contribute to regional development that is in the EU member states' interest, or to help implement policies the EU has passed. There are arguments to be made about how well the member states' (or their citizens') interests are represented in the EU's electoral structure, or how effective these programmes are in general, but saying this is "the government deciding who gets funds" is absurd.
Mozilla, though, not so much. Given the ridiculous paychecks its C-level management has been caching in the midst of the massive layouts that cannibalized most of its most promising projects (including MDN staff), I don't think funding is the primary problem holding them back right now.
Sounds good.
Even the copy suggests you're better off not getting this, waiting at least a year for the content to be posted "every month," then subbing for a single month to read it all.
Maybe the Wikipedia/donation model would have been a better play for MDN then this, particularly as freemium was originally about micro-transactions, not $2 more than the cost of Netflix's Basic tier.
Now it falls into the uncanny valley of: Too "product" to be a donation, and not really enough of a product to be a real product.
https://developer.mozilla.org/api/v1/plus/landing-page/varia...
If you nuke the sessionid cookie and reload you'll either get "$5 a month or $50 a year" (variant 1) or "$10 a month or $100 a year" (variant 2).
(*) Keep in mind that this might have unwanted side effects.
The exclusive content just seems like a way of pushing would-be donors over the edge.
It's sort of similar to LWN. The articles are top notch but available for free after a delay (likewise, anything truly useful on MDN+ will leak out on to other platforms). People who subscribe to LWN just want to support the efforts and make sure the content continues to flow, they're not really concerned with the exclusivity of getting it first.
This has nothing to do with cost of living or purchasing power parity. It’s just random testing.
So long as the docs themselves remain under CC-BY-SA though guess it's not really a problem. The premium features they currently offer seem reasonable, and if things ever get too out of hand the community could always just move to another site. It also doesn't sound like something I'd pay for though, so not sure how successful it'll be.
On the positive side, more funding to maintain MDN could turn out to be a good thing in the long term. I guess we'll have to see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licking_ice_cream_cone
Whether overly abundant donations are misallocated is a completely orthogonal issue.
Note that I’m not saying we are entitled to anything; but slapping the MDN brand on a premium subscription service does tarnish the original brand a little.
Is my understanding incorrect?
Wikipedia misallocating funds does tarnish the original brand a lot, especially when most people that contribute content are doing it for free.
Which has nothing to do the donation model.
Wikimedia can pay full time content writers if they want to.
Mozilla can also use the subscription income to pay CEO comp if they want to.
Allocation of funds has close to nothing to do with the acquisition of funds, unless the acquisition comes with a specific mandate, which neither Wikipedia donations nor the subscription service here has.
I don't think that is true (maybe I missed something from their page?), which means they will always have the incentive to make more premium content in order to generate more revenue, especially if they need it to cover the expenses.
On a long enough timeline, all free and libre services done out of the good will and charitable efforts of contributors and maintainers, will eventually succumb to some sort of monetization strategy. I know in my case, and last time I checked, I don't work for free.
The Mozilla Corporation exists to partially make money just like any other corporation. How can HN both complain when Mozilla sheds dead weight, but also diversifies revenue?
Mozilla shepherded MDN into the hands of the community quite well imo. They busted their butt to make the content easy to contribute to through GitHub.
Please have some perspective on situations instead of "Hur dur Mozilla fired these people".
> The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation
> The Mozilla Corporation's stated aim is to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet."
That's why; it's not so 1 + 1 = 2. There is a ton of discretion and leeway baked into their mission on matters like MDN.
I'm conducive to the possibility that Mozilla has, as another commenter has said, "lost its way".
I'd love to see them make a come-back, but it's been so damn long and they're showing so many strongly negative signs that I think they're long since rotted beyond hope, organizationally. Better they're replaced. I don't think they're an organization capable of replacing themselves with a better upstart of their own making, as Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox did to the Mozilla browser, nor of innovating—Pocket and a VPN service are their innovative monetization and self-sufficiency efforts. Not leaping into any number of promising avenues for web services that would benefit from having an open-source-friendly but well-capitalized backer offering a paid version with a built-in audience to push the Web and potentially the Internet forward, but... Pocket and a VPN. How do you miss the boat that badly? How many teams building the sorts of things Firefox should have been (Signal, Matrix, Gemini, IPFS, various open-source social network efforts like Mastodon, et c.) are small enough to comfortably fit within the Firefox org? Several, I imagine.
What a waste of potential.
How do you figure?
I was once a strong supporter of Mozilla but never again.
You can "flip" through MDN's other (free) articles, or the excerpts they've provided here to decide if it's worth your money.
How is reading free content on your phone harder than walking to a bookstore? (Also this seems like a paywall, not a walled garden.)
I remember those times too, but there were no magazines for me to flip through to learn CSS float-based/table-based layouts. I had to look at ::shudders:: W3Schools.
Did you click the link? The second blob of text, above the fold and not easy to miss:
> Nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs content — this content will continue to be free and available to everyone. We want to provide extra value through premium content and features to help make MDN self-sustaining, on a completely opt-in basis. Again, nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs!
The experience you describe at the bookstore mirrors the proposed experience for MDN Plus rather well, actually.
It feels like this could have landed with a bit more punch and a more compelling sell and it could very well evolve into something very valuable but I can't see the appeal right now.
Another commenter mentioned $10 a month but I'm seeing $5 at the moment. Right now there's just no features I'd consider paying anything for. I would happily pay $5-$10 a month though for something more fleshed out, more regular high quality technical deep dives and some other benefits that justify a regular subscription.
Unless they intentionally break it somehow, my print dialog can already do that to any page.
Actually it's even easier: "file -> export to PDF" is an option in Safari. Saves a couple clicks.
I get the idea, but including that on the list of premium features is really weird. Are they just not going to provide a print stylesheet at all, unless you pay? Maybe that's it.
There are surely tens of thousands of companies worldwide, whose employees rely on MDN on a daily basis. There are poor startups among them, but many of those companies have pretty deep pockets. If just a small percentage of those employees ask their bosses for this $5/mo. sub, this can improve things considerably. For now everything is free, so no one has an incentive, or a way, to pay.
As developers, we are collectively guilty for never asking our employees for anything which costs $$$. Many of us (me including) assume that asking for a few bucks sub is almost a crime. Or we don't want to deal with stupid bureaucracy and an arcane process to set up the sub.
Personally I hope the experiment will work. Let's see in a few months.
I think the best model would be something like: subscribers get the premium content immediately, other people with a few weeks/months delay. This would keep a healthy balance and keep the incentives in place for people to pay.
More like this IMO. There tends to be a lot of process with this sort of thing, which makes me reluctant to bother. Especially if I'll have to do it over and over again.
Everyone's suggesting lower price levels, but I'd suggest they have a higher enterprise price level. I bet a lot of medium-large corporations would pay a few thousand a year for all of their employees to have access to this new top-tier MDN plus. Would probably have to support the usual rigamarole of corporate POs and billing and tools to administer accounts with large numbers of users.
The next time I have a web dev job I'll buy this
But now they are competing with free content from Smashing and CSS-Tricks and lessons from a variety of free sources, including Google who has great course content.
I just don't see this saving Mozilla.
You walk into a bar and the guy in front of you orders a beer for $5. Looks good, so you order the same thing. The bartender says, "For you it's $10." Do you feel fairly treated?
Moreover next to the price there's a disclaimer that the "Price is subject to change".
To me it seems that they're just running an experiment to determine what's the price they should put to the service, which seems smart and correct.
It's the intent I guess. The bartender story seems to imply a bad reason for the discrepancy (some type of unfair discrimination), while in this case it's to find out if you can charge more to eg capture back more of the value people are getting from you. Which doesn't seem so bad.
Then there are tests that would be hard to run even on different days, like doubling your nominal price and splashing a "today only 50% off" or "buy one get one free" offer.
Real-world price testing is so much harder to pull off, it isn't as common, which is part of the reason web A/B tests seem jarring when the curtain is pulled back.
Subscription prices vary by all types of audiences for subscription-based models, test segments are just one of them, and one of the least shady in my opinion. It's a brand new product and they're gauging the right price.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132494