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.
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.