Mozilla prepares to launch MDN Plus in March 2022
soeren-hentzschel.atI, for one, am encouraged to see Mozilla try and create new revenue streams.
I hope I am not the lone positive voice in the thread - it does seem no company gets quite the same level of criticism as Mozilla on HN
>it does seem no company gets quite the same level of criticism as Mozilla on HN
Perhaps, but Mozilla is also the company most centered at the intersection "mission we like and wish the company succeeded at" and "management doing stupid shit one after another"....
I am puzzled why didn’t they lunch their own VPN to the world and instead got a rebranded one and it’s still restricted only to few countries. To me that’s another proof they’re just not great at operating.
I am puzzled about why you're puzzled!
They knew they weren't good at executing on something, so they partnered with a company with a proven track record, and leveraged their brand to make sure both Mozilla and their partner got value.
It's a very successful business model, and has been used everywhere (entertainment is a great example, most IP owners license the creation of content outside of their immediate domain to other developers - toy manufacturers, video game studios, comic book and board games companies, etc).
In a world where the relevance of Firefox is waning, investing in a brand where user centricity, privacy, and security are key, and maintaining high standards on licensees is a winning strategy, especially if Mozilla owns the customer relationships.
Also, they rebranded a quality one. Mullvad has an excellent track record. It was one of the first VPNs to support WireGuard, and its one of the very few which can be paid by with cash money.
That said, 3 million USD/year is a ridiculous wage for a non-profit (even if its a for-profit-in-non-profit construction). There's no function in the world which warrants such a wage.
You didn’t answer the main question of the GP, as to why Mozilla VPN hasn’t been launched in many more countries. After all, the service from Mullvad can be bought directly from most countries…tens of countries more than where Mozilla VPN is currently available.
You didn’t address the second point: why after such a long time (years?) can’t I still buy it, even rebranded?
Are you in a region that isn't supported? I can buy it from Canada :/
Yeah, I’m Ukraine. Not sure which other countries not supported
I'm always amazed when seemingly everyone in a thread on Mozilla has only negative things to say. I for one welcomed the UI change with the new tabs and look forward to give them some money if this MDN Plus turns out to be interesting.
Because Mozilla, from all the looks of it, has turned from a company that innovated in the web, into a cash cow providing its CEO with means to support her luxurious lifestyle. This, as well as the fact that if I’d like to donate to the browser specifically, I can’t, screams “money laundering” and “corruption” to me. What else it is, if abysmal company performance is rewarded with bonuses?
Now there will come those saying that since it’s not a government, it can’t be corruption, they can go ans screw themselves in advance.
It is clear from your tone that you won't be convinced by any argument, but why is it that this particular CEO earning a high salary is "money laundering" and "corruption"?
Mozilla and Firefox developers are still actively engaged in web standards, and are still punching above their weight in terms of building a web browser with a small team, and narrow revenue streams.
I don't necessarily agree that Mozilla has the right leadership, but how do you expect that leadership to change constructively if the pay isn't competitive with other tech companies of similar size and scale (1/2 Billion in revenue, and hundreds of millions of users)?
Do you think that Mozilla lately producing flops instead of products (except for the browser, but that is slowly turning into a flop too) is all because its CEO is “underpaid”?
Money laundering and corruption makes it a bit hard to take you seriously. What money do they need to launder exactly?
It's good that Mozilla is trying to diversify its income streams, it's a bit worrying when they are so dependent on Google.
Turning the anti-monopoly racket protection money from Google into rent for Mozilla’s executives while the company is consistently underperforming when it comes to its stated goals does sound like corruption.
In an underperforming company, executives have no grounds for rewards or raises. In a still-healthy company, they would likely have been replaced.
That's neither money laundering nor corruption.
Why don't you understand the fact that Mozilla isn't perfect in every way forces me to use the much more ethical browser made by Google. At least Google's CEOs aren't paid that much.. /s
>it does seem no company gets quite the same level of criticism as Mozilla on HN
People here literally accuse Facebook of being a global Orwellian totalitarian superstate that engages in genocide and MK-ULTRA style mind-control, but OK.
>I hope I am not the lone positive voice in the thread - it does seem no company gets quite the same level of criticism as Mozilla on HN
That's what happens when you go around with a holier-than-thou attitude: they set high standars for the industry when they themselves fail to meet those standards every time.
Frankly, it's better than the race to the bottom that most tech companies are satisfied with.
My issues with Mozilla's leadership team were never about the vision, mostly about the execution. I don't like Brendan Eich's politics, or the cryptocurrency and borderline shakedown approach that he used to build and launch Brave, but the goal of keeping competition alive on the web? I could get behind that.
I don't like the recurring fallback to Google search revenue by the Mozilla leadership team, but it's kept Mozilla around to keep fighting the fight, and give the opportunity to find other options to keep fighting for their principles (which are not wokeness and leftism, despite what folks would have you believe - https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ )
Choosing a hill to die on doesn't make you virtuous, it just makes you dead. Mozilla is alive and seems to be trying to move forward, and I hope they succeed.
Will this actually let us fund Firefox development, or is it another way to line the pockets of the wildly overpaid Mozilla Foundation executives?
Sorry to be so negative, but as a long-time Firefox fan, I despair at the disparity between the funding for the Firefox team vs the executive team
Mitchell Baker made 2,698,800.00 USD in 2020 according to the IRS form[0] mozilla foundation filed, but not from the foundation but from the "related for-profit", i.e. mozilla corperation where she was and still is CEO as well (she is CEO of both, the non-profit foundation and the for-profit subsidiary at the moment). There is no such public IRS form available for 2021 yet.
[0] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-2020-fo... Page 7 (9 in the PDF)
that data is wrong or incomplete, she was reported as being paid >$3mm in 2020
source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/endangered-firefox-the-state-o...
Is $210k in the Bay Area “wildly overpaid?”
That looks quite far from accurate/complete/current.
I am really excited to see Mozilla actually moving forward on revenue diversification in a way that adds value to the technical community (VPN, Relay, MDN Plus).
Back when I was managing one of the security teams at Mozilla there was an attempt to build out some revenue diversification options, and one of the areas I was involved with was developer services, basically offering paid, hosted versions of the open source tools we were already building and using (web compat, security and testing services, etc) that could be used by developers. It never got off the ground, and the lack of traction was one of the reasons I left; I view my failure to succeed in my attempts there as one my biggest professional let downs :(
I want to think that it sounds like some of Mozilla's leadership has finally gotten out of the way of the folks that are doing awesome work, and it makes me hopeful for the future of the project and the Mozilla mission.
Congrats to the teams behind these services!
English Summary:
Free MDN isn't going away.
MDN Plus is a premium content service that will offer deep dives into technical topics. The service was tested over the summer.
Additional announced features include bookmarking across all of MDN, commenting, offline browsing, and themes.
Price: USD10/month or USD100/year.
Time frame: March 2022
I'm torn about this initiative. MDN should be governed by a foundation that can be funded directly, with content that is accessible for all. By introducing a paid service with private content, it will reduce incentives to contribute insightful documentation and guides to the free version.
Free content drivers people to the paid version. Is not like this model doesn't work. It's on every SaaS out there.
Having a big paying community will drive more free content, as both the paying and free customers benefit from it.
If free content start sucking, less people sign up.
Plus, some content just isn't worth privatizing, like documentation.
I downloaded an open-source software today, and all over the UI were the buttons to upgrade to their paid closed-source version. Freaking hell.
Since it's open source obviously someone is going to chime in that I should spend my time removing these stupid UI elements...
There is an interesting conversation to be had here.
Open source software requires that developers have the ability to spend time to contribute code. People need to get paid so they can support themselves, and as they get older, their families.
There are very few successful open source models, basically: * advertising * professional services related to the OSS offering * enterprise licensing * direct user support and contribution
Anything that is not one of these four models is either a student or hobby project, or is subsidized by the businesses that are paying the developers to contribute (either explicitly by hiring folks that work on the projects, or by employing and assigning people to work on features that eventually make their way back into the ecosystem).
If you don't support people getting paid to contribute to open source software, you are ceding the role of OSS developers to people in privileged positions, or demanding that they be paupers.
And in the interest of keeping the conversation non confrontational, folks suggesting patches shouldn't remove the UI elements from the code, they should provide a UI toggle to disable the nags; choosing to support the software or not, financially speaking, is an option for users, but be very explicit if the user chooses not to support it :)
> bookmarking across all of MDN, commenting, offline browsing, and themes
Very lackluster
Not against it as long as the basics remain free.
I don't think I would be interested in the content that much (unless they go way beyond the usual FE articles), but I'll happily pay $100 a year in support of MDN/Firefox.
Even though I don't use Firefox it has an important role imo. I use MDN almost daily and I get lots of value out of it. I fully support them trying out new revenue streams.
> "Monthly articles with special depth on specific topics from industry experts as well as features to get more out of the MDN Web Docs" ... "includes the ability to use the MDN Web Docs offline, to create your own personal collection that you can access from any device, to be notified of changes to certain articles, and themes"
I'm not particularly impressed. Does anyone really want to pay for the modern version of Linda.com, when we're swamped with free tutorials and blogs already...?
We're swamped with blogspam. I already attach "mozilla" or "mdn" to some searches, like some people attach "reddit", because information about base web technology is far better there than on w3cschools or $random_medium_post
> w3cschools
There is no such thing. There is the W3C, an international standards consortium that has published standards relating to the WWW, and there is W3Schools (no “C”), who seemingly picked the name to confuse people into thinking they were somehow a part of the W3C, which they frequently succeed at. The two organisations are not associated with each other in any way.
Sorry, I thought the address looked odd. I blocked it from search results with an extension long ago.
MDN Plus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302702 - May, 2021 (214 comments)
Source is in german, translation here: https://www-soeren--hentzschel-at.translate.goog/mdn/exklusi...
I welcome this idea and will gladly pay immediately when they launch. After that, they will have to earn the money with quality content. If the service provided is good, I don't care for CEO's salary or whatnot; if not I don't care for the CEO either way.
Where the eff did this thread go on HN?! It is only 2 hours old, and was at #1 an hour ago. Now it’s not on the first 6 pages of HN. WTF?
$10 per month sounds expensive for what is currently rumored.
Got to pay for that 7-figure CEO salary and fancy San Fran office somehow.
Yup, such a waste. Can't they work for free in their parent's basement like we expect other FOSS contributors to? While we use their stuff for free, never contributing anything back.
I'm not saying it should be done for free, but they could do a much better job in funding engineers.
It was awful when they let go the Rust and Cranelift engineers.
Reminds me of Oracle - where the lawyers and MBAs have just seized control.
We literally can't contribute to Firefox development. Only Google and other big corps, that strike deals with Mozilla, can.
People wouldn't whine about it if they were actually delivering more value than 3mm/year.
Under what licence will this plus content be published? Because if it is CC, it will take someone minutes to whip up a website with all plus content.