MDN Plus

Everyone who's been saying "I wish they would just charge money for this", here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is!

I'll pay. But I kind of wish they were laser focused on just the content and not obligated to deliver useless pay for features.

The content isn't (and shouldn't be) paywalled. There's no option but to add other paid features around it, which someone users may find useless but others maybe won't. You could also always just treat it as a monthly donation and not use any of it.

Are they going to rehire all the dedicated editors and staff they laid off?

Or is this really just charging money for all their now open source contributed content...

This is a “what about … “ response.

The only important thing is if they are going to invest in new staff in the future. The old staff almost certainly have new jobs in new companies.

Let’s not move the goal posts. Having reason to invest in enhancing documentation, and creating a viable revenue stream by doing so is a good thing, even if decisions in the past are regrettable.

No the "we'll pay for it!" comments were in the context of the staff being let go and departments spun down. We meant, we'll pay to keep this high quality content going.

No one said, sure yeah fire all those folks, flail around for a year, convince people to just give free content for funsies, then we'll slap a price tag on it so the exec bonuses can keep getting higher.

We'd pay for the old Mozilla that cared about a high quality web. That Mozilla appears to be long dead.

Neither. As the article specifically mentions, they will not be charging for the existing open content, or any future changes or additions to it. Why you would try to suggest they might do this is beyond me.

They will be selling additional "premium features" at launch time, as described in this article, and plan to sell specifically created additional content, like in-depth articles, in the longer run, as described in previous articles.

Maybe this will enable them to hire back some of the people they let go (assuming these people are willing). But the main goal is to put mdn on a level of funding where little or no funding from mozilla is required anymore.

When people said “we will pay for it” the decision had already been made, it was too late.

Mozilla is not pay-walling the open documentation, it’s still available. They are pay-walling features that make it easier to save pages, navigate, and use the docs offline.

There are alternatives, in the form of Devdocs.io, Zeal, and Dash, if you want similar features but don’t want to pay Mozilla.

You are not losing anything you already can access to my knowledge.

That's my point. I'd rather donate and just have the money go towards improving the free content instead of them wasting time on email notifications and useless stuff like that. It feels like my money is being wasted when really I just wanted to support the wiki.

I didn't say that I think but I am tempted to pay anyway.

The big question is:

Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?

There's no way to win.

1. Entity donates resources to maintain a resource for free, while pulling in revenue from an unrelated source => they're beholden to that unrelated source and it's unsustainable, we shouldn't take them seriously.

2. Entity scales back to maintenance of that resource => they're abandoning what made them great.

3. Entity re-monetizes the resource more directly => what are they monetizing, they don't do anything to maintain it.

What people want is an instantaneous jump to:

4. Entity already has resource monetized and is already significantly maintaining that resource.

But a company in position #2 can't just jump directly to #4. It's fair to ask about the direction that a company is going and whether or not they'll follow up, but sometimes I feel like critics want teleportation, not movement.

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Mozilla is pretty clearly still investing into MDN (both in ways that I really like such as the learning areas, and in a few ways that I'm less thrilled about, like a few recent UX decisions). But if MDN plus allows them to continue that investment, it's worthwhile -- ideally, if they make enough money off of it, we might see them increase that investment. If there's evidence that they're not going to, then fine, I guess, but I don't really see that evidence.

What MDN Plus offers is basically what people have been asking for with Firefox except for MDN. It's direct funding for the product itself.

I'll also point out that providing a platform for permissive-licensed content is itself important work and should be supported. It is good that this content is permissively licensed, and alongside MDN plus, we can actually look at permissively licensed donated content as a way of "funding" a public resource. If the content wasn't permissively licensed, my feelings about that would be very different, but this isn't a scenario where people are donating resources to Mozilla that only Mozilla can use and that are then kept captive -- people are donating content that anyone can use and that anyone can modify and re-host, it's remaining in the control of the community.

That's not to say that we shouldn't try to get to #4 again, but an MDN without a ton of professional editors is still worth funding. Particularly given the contribution model, where if you really want to pay for editors you can just go hire editors yourself and pay them to contribute to MDN.

This reminds me a bit about the conversations about Wikipedia. I have tons of criticism about Wikipedia and tons of criticism about how it fundraises, but one of the criticisms I don't have is that it has too much money. Wikipedia is one of the most important resources on the entire Internet and it's good for a project like that to be over-funded. Similarly, I think MDN is one of the most important educational resources for Javascript on the entire Internet, and I don't really see the problem with giving it more money, even if all that was happening with that money was that it was being dumped into server resources or making the owners feel more comfortable about it.

You could always have been donating already then. This is for people who may need these features and so start paying money when they weren't before.

What is that insane salary? Seems you have no idea about how much executives are paid at that level in general. Or for Mozilla everyone has to work for free?

Maybe somewhere between the two extremes?

I do want to re-state, not as a way of shutting down conversation but as a legitimate idea that might not be a terrible thing for people to pursue if they feel strongly about it:

You could pay people directly to contribute to MDN if you wanted to and if you got enough people together to pay a salary. An org could do that, someone could have a Patreon where a bunch of people drop them a monthly salary to devote X hours a month to editing MDN articles, there are lots of ways of funding that kind of content from professional or at least high-quality writers.

It'll still go through the normal contribution process, but the beauty of this being permissively licensed is that you don't necessarily need Mozilla itself to give people money to contribute content. We're not in the same situation as people donating content to, say, Reddit or Goodreads, where much of that content won't actually be accessible to the community depending on what the company decides to do in the future.

And again, I don't bring that up as a "why are you complaining, just fix it yourself" argument, it's legitimately a thing I would support if there were serious efforts in that direction. If it's something you really care about and feel confident about and you have a drive in that direction, it would probably be helpful to have community-paid editors for MDN.

There is no way to donate to MDN directly. You can only donate to the Mozilla charitable foundation which is not related to MDN.

Does Mozilla pay their software developers an industry-standard TC?

Hopefully it goes to MDN. I do wish there was a way to fund Firefox directly, but I hope that MDN plus resources are for MDN, not Firefox.

> Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?

Serious question: do you ask other vendors (Google, Amazon, Wapo, whoever) you use about HR and internal budgeting choices before deciding to do business with them?

Nobody said anyone has to work for free. In general (not picking on Mozilla), I think it’s hypocritical when non-execs are told they should accept lower pay than they would make at a for-profit because “our mission!”, while execs justify their out-of-proportion pay by citing how much they could make at a for-profit. Shouldn’t executives be __more__ committed to the mission?

If they were nonprofits working for the good of humanity, and yet had exponentially increased their executive salaries over the last five years while market share went down, then yes.

It looks like Mozilla's average SDE salary is about $120k, so yes.

The national median software developer salary is something like $110k. The middle 50% range is like $85-150k, so if you're making above 150k TC you're already in the top 1/4 of developers, who are already very high up in general.

I say this because people on HN love to pretend that "industry-standard" means $250k+ for new grads and $400k for experienced ICs when that's just not true. FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%.

> Why you would try to suggest they might do this is beyond me.

Cynical take: because reading is hard so people just don't do it, and see "MDN" in the title so take this as their chance to scream into the void about whatever tangentially related nonsense they care about today.

OP was clearly specific: EXEC salaries, not engineers and developers. And I'm not sure I would want their current execs there even if they indeed worked for free, not to mention at their absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down.

So yeah, find me a way to finance Firefox only, and not the funny projects, and to ensure that not a single cent goes to their execs (neither directly nor through some creative accounting, where they reduce engineer salaries to offset the cashflow from this new stream, and pocket the savings), and you have my 10 bucks a month for the next 8 years (and possibly longer, but let's see what they do in 8 years). I won't move the goalposts and I'll make good on my promise.

No they need to pocket 8 million dollars and fire developers, absolutely

I'd appreciate a pay-what-you-want option. (I still subscribed for $50 annual because you called me out, promise I'm not shilling!)

The person you replied to was specific as well. Execs are paid well industry wide. If you aren't willing to pay market rates then you aren't going to get competent leadership to manage organizations at that scale.

The only 3rd party requests I see on their pages are Google analytics and a CDN'd js lib. Hell yes I'll throw them some cash if they'll keep their core product free for folks who don't use it often/can't afford it. I'd love to see them get rid of google analytics even, but compared to most it's pretty clean.

What pisses me off is when someone like a newspaper will start charging AND keep 4 TB of tracking garbage every single page load. Get lost.

Get rid of GA.

> Serious question: do you ask other vendors (Google, Amazon, Wapo, whoever) you use about HR and internal budgeting choices before deciding to do business with them?

It’s a very common question when you give money to a non-profit, which Mozilla is.

Currently seems paying market rates and not getting competent leadership, so something seems amiss.

Donations are all fine and dandy, but there are some problems:

- Getting people to donate in a recurring fashion is exceedingly hard. Not impossible (as some patreons prove), but still hard.

- Getting businesses to donate at all, let alone in a recurring fashion, is even harder.

mdn needs money, not just for content, but to keep the lights on. Their content is furthermore aimed largely at "professionals" (and some enthusiasts), meaning convincing businesses to give money is even more important than e.g. is the case with wikipedia or your random youtube content creator.

Businesses are easier to convince to spend money if you offer them something in return. Doesn't really have to be much or something particularly valuable, just something, anything really, that then can be used to justify the expense to management/comptrollers/legal/owners as a "valid" expense.

I personally had people contact me in the past, on more than one occasion, saying they made good use of some code I open sourced in their commercial stuff, and they'd like to gift me something, but they cannot get permission from their employer to transfer any funds unless I formally enter a "consulting" contract (and NDA and yadayada) or officially sell them something. So the best they could do is offer me some company swag and/or a small donation out of their own pocket. So now I own a bunch of T-Shirts and coffee mugs from various companies :P (and I am OK with that, since I never had the intention to profit from that code).

So creating some easy "premium features" may indeed enable mdn to collect more money, especially from businesses, compared to them just asking for donations.

It remains to be seen if that will work for mdn, and if mdn will then use the money "wisely", but I really cannot fault them for their approach so far...

Ah yes, FireFox's issue is they're paying Execs below market rate.

If they want to get better market share they should start paying more!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Ol...

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Afaik people's main issues with the exec salary is their poor performance. Why pay "market rate" for "below market performance"?

Do you apply the same rigorous standards to all your purchases?

Do you refuse to buy a drink or a pair of shoes or a travel ticket unless you can ensure that "not a single cent goes to execs" who get "absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down"?

Or do you think the Mozilla execs are _uniquely_ greedy to a degree not comparable to that of the execs of Nestlé, Nike, etc.?

(EDIT: This is assuming that you actively want to purchase MDN Plus. If you don't care about the perks but would purchase it solely as a donation, then it's understandable if you give a higher scrutiny to charities than to sellers.)

Agreed. Considering how much they put into usability, they should be able to get enough data without third party tracking involved at all. That said, perfect is the enemy of good and I'll give them credit for being good— especially considering the norm.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to compare the take-home-pay of a Google engineer working on Chrome to that of a Mozilla engineer working on Firefox. That’s a good peer comparison to make.

It is definitely unreasonable to compare a Mozilla engineer’s pay to an average brought down by body-shop CRUD operations. They’re really not the same industry.

People like only certain things about Mozilla, most of which aren't due to execs. Firefox being well engineered (and not having meddling pointless features such as "Colorways") and up on the latest standards, good engineering representation in browser standards from a non-Google, and MDN. That'll do. Oh, and Rust, but the execs already did for that.

Don't need execs coming in selling VPNs with the browser.

And that's why people are worried about where the money will go.

That definitely feels a bit low. Is this considering only US or worldwide?

So, good engineering things are not because of execs.

Bad engineering things are all because of execs?

Sad truth is nobody wants to pay for anything and when they can they'll just complain.

I think we as internet users are as much a part of the 'you're the product' and 'free for life .. oh never mind' ecosystem because most of the users on the internet won't respond to anything else.

No idea. But the things I care about are detailed and engineering-related. Execs shouldn't exist by default. Even if I couldn't point to anything bad they've done, that's not enough activation energy to require them.

I was a loud proponent of this and just signed up at the $10 tier. I'm thrilled to see they put this together but still dismayed at the re-org that resulted in firing (some?) of the staff that maintained MDN.

I'll pick up a subscription. MDN is valuable and anything that helps keep the content free is valuable.

Generally, yes. That is the allegation. If you don't agree with that fine, but I'd imagine alot of engineers would agree with that in general with their experience in industry. Let alone Mozilla.

Mozilla Foundation is non profit. Mozilla corporation is for profit.

Mitchell Baker owns it all and draws a salary from the corporation according to public records.

Pretty sure the foundation owns the IP etc and the corp leases it, funneling money around.

Statements are public.

Outside of SV/NYC, that's not low at all.

>> Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?

> Serious question: do you ask other vendors (Google, Amazon, Wapo, whoever) you use about HR and internal budgeting choices before deciding to do business with them?

Mozilla is a lot more like a charity than an actual business, and people do ask questions like that about charities (e.g. how much of a donation will go to admin overhead vs program work is often reported for them).

But do other vendors ask me to use their product out of a sense of altruism?

I don’t know how many appeals I have seen asking me to use Firefox to help preserve the open web.

When they are asking you to behave altruistically, it is your right to ask about their behavior as well.

Same for me, I'd love to get a subscription for Firefox!

I pay for pocket subscription just for this.

Mozilla corporation is fully owned by the foundation though.

While what you’re saying is factually correct, my biggest pet peeve is that Firefox is entirely owned and developed by the corporation. If I donate money to Mozilla, it ends up with the silly projects instead of the browser.

To me, this is a problem, and while it’s documented somewhere, it’s not nearly communicated well enough on their website when you’re actually making a donation. As a matter of fact, it’s sometimes even downright misleading.

As such, I don’t believe the corporate structure is a healthy one, and the organization(s) are not properly aligned in where the profit comes from, where they make the biggest impact in the world, and where the donations go to.

When you say "Mitchell Baker owns it all", you aren't claiming that Mitchell owns Mozilla Corp, are you? Mozilla Corp is owned by Mozilla Foundation, as described in the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

Most Mozilla employees draw their salary from Mozilla Corp.

I do not do business with them where I can help it

It seemed like the person you're responding to was asking a rhetorical question that responded to the original statement ("here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is"), not directing a question at Mozilla itself.

As a response to that prompt, it's a completely legitimate question to ask: would my money actually be going where I want it to go?

Anyway, I think people do ask themselves where the money they spend goes. They do that all the time. It's the basis boycotting different businesses. They don't ask it in every case, such as when the question has been answered already, or where there isn't ongoing controversy about how money is being spent.

Normally, no, obviously!

But this is a special case IMO -- Firefox is something people care very deeply as they view it as a crucial bastion of the free and open internet.

But Mozilla's revenue and market share went down since the drastic increase in execs' pay. Would that be acceptable in a for-profit company?

The usual counter argument in this type of discussions is that it's Google's fault, because they changed their sponsorship, and there's nothing the execs could do. And then the counter to that is why pay big salaries if there's nothing they can do about revenues. Back to square 0.

I wish Mozilla setup funds for each project like it was done for Thunderbird. Then the execs can be paid from sponsorships etc.. but I personally have stopped to give to Mozilla any money since that change happened.

Yes, that would be revelation. Engineers saying engineers are right, doctors saying doctors are right.

> FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%.

Mozilla is going against FAANG products like Chrome. Compared to the competition their salaries are tiny.

I spend as much of my time, and as many of my resources, as possible away from those horrid greedy bastards.

I know that a lot of people here have fantasies about becoming one of those yada yada ya.... But it is not good. Our system where huge resources go to a self selecting elite and the rest of us are left with the crumbs is going nowhere good and I keep as far out of it as I can.

I do not want to live in a shack in the woods, so I have to engage a bit. But as much as possible and practical, I do not.

> but I am tempted to pay anyway > Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?

Ah, so you aren't going to pay at all. This is just a soapbox to start dissing Mozilla again with the usual tropes.

OpenWebDocs is focused on MDN/CanIUse browser compatability data AND MDN content. Many people who used to work for moz on MDN now work with them. OpenWebDocs.org

Looks like if you do pay market rates, you still get execs running a company into the ground. The high salary comes with the expectation of results.

I agree with that but I see 90% of the time people just complaining about the high salaries. As much as those salaries may seem ridiculous the Bay Area is a very competitive place and I do not see many competent execs taking a massive downgrade in compensation just because they may believe in Firefox on principal.

That being said poor performance is for sure something to criticize on - although to be fair we are talking about competing with some of the largest and most entrenched companies on earth - not an easy job.

Mozilla laid off most of the MDN team in 2020 [1], then shifted the responsibility of updating MDN from Mozilla to the community [2], then created the Open Web Docs organization to take over the job of funding MDN [3].

And _now_ they come asking us to pay for MDN? I am not optimistic about this.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132494 [2]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/12/welcome-yari-mdn-web-docs-... [3]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/01/welcoming-open-web-docs-to...

>Would that be acceptable in a for-profit company?

If their revenue went way up, absolutely. Which is what happened when the executives got more money.

I already replied to this kind of logic elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30793257), but I don't see the logic of looking at Mozilla cutting support for a program then introducing a way to fund that program, and responding to that by saying, "why should I fund something that's seeing cuts?"

Hopefully it goes to MDN. Nothing about the scenario you describe would be improved by funneling money from MDN to Firefox, that would make the problem worse. What I'd like is for Mozilla to introduce ways to fund Firefox directly, not for the money to come from a different critical web resource.

I always wonder at the thought process behind these questions.

Yes, Mozilla (.org) is a non-profit, and Mozilla (.com) is a regular corporation. Yes, Mozilla has commitments about transparency. Yes, exec salaries are insane.

Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or business they make to this degree? In the laundry list of entertainment, learning, and professional subscriptions, what portion of spotify, github, or other popular subs end up contributing to just the feature or service you like as opposed to the entire organization and other initiatives that the organization supports?

It's idealism. We still hope, despite the evidence, that Mozilla can be unadulteratedly good, as long as we only look at the open source side of it.

We already know that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Oracle are evil.

From: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/03/mozilla-and-open-web-docs-...

> Any revenue generated by MDN Plus will stay within Mozilla. Mozilla is looking into ways to reinvest some of these additional funds into open source projects contributing to MDN but it is still in early stages.

> A subscription to MDN Plus gives paying subscribers extra MDN features provided by Mozilla while a donation to Open Web Docs goes to funding writers creating content on MDN Web Docs, and potentially elsewhere.

It's not totally clear to me after a little research, but I think MDN is part of the corporation, not the foundation? (It's isn't listed as on the foundation website as one of their projects.

I'm really unhappy with how much money Spotify is pumping into podcasts because I really want them to give that money to musicians instead (I don't listen to podcasts)

It's not just the classic "evil" companies though. When you buy a jar of peanut butter, do you demand every cent to be going to production of the jar without overhead? Do you check the peanut butter company's CEO's salary to ensure it's not too high? I sure don't.

> Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or business they make to this degree?

If you are giving charitable donation to the Mozilla Foundation, it is entirely reasonable to ask what they use that money for.

what revenue? Without Google's half billion dollars per year they are dead.

Subscribing to MDN Plus does not support Open Web Docs, which is the organization that does the funding for creating/managing the content for the free product.

If you want to support the free product, donate directly to Open Web Docs: https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs

And that question being common is exactly why many non-profits have focused on reducing "overhead", actually making the organisation less efficient, because having e.g. medical workers do their own administration doesn't get listed as overhead, whereas hiring a secretary does.

With charities in general, it'd be better if people focused on results more, rather than on how resources are being allocated. Luckily, that idea has been gaining more and more traction, e.g. GiveWell.

But we have a lot of control over the software we use on a daily basis, and there are several capable browsers. I want to use a browser that has a commitment to privacy, is still functional, etc. and Firefox fits the bill for many. If it doesn't, they want to know so they can change it. Food is a little more complicated in that regard. For instance, if you find the "better" brand tastes terrible...well, it's not really a choice.

Speak for yourself.

I was signed up within 90 seconds of seeing the announcement. That's not intended to be virtue signalling, just one anecdotal datum - and I'm confident that there are many, many people who feel the gratitude I feel.

Much appreciated.

Nothing is amiss. Paying competitive salary is necessary condition not sufficient one. Just like paying IT staff competitive salary is basic requirement but that does not guarantee projects' success at all.

> Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or business they make to this degree?

Yes. When you are paying for something, you should have an idea of where that money is actually going. That is why it comes up here. There isn't anything exceptional about this case with Mozilla.

Are you serious? What company or organization works like this? With goal posts like this, you've got the perfect excuse to never donate any money to them.

How do you give an organization money, and ensure that that specific dollar doesn't go to the execs? Any money that goes to the org, pays for those execs one way or another. You can't just ask the Firefox team to pretend they don't exist.

The difference with other services is that what people want when they subscribe to Spotify is access to music. What (at least some) people want when they subscribe to MDN Plus is ensure that Firefox and other open Web projects stay relevant. If people paid for Spotify merely so that Spotify stayed relevant, they would probably care in similar measure how Spotify spends its money.

I think these questions come from the idea baked into charitable giving. When you purchase a good, the thing you're getting is obvious, it is what you're purchasing.

However, when you're giving to charity, what are you getting? You probably want to know.

If charities are smart, I bet they could take advantage of this by creating classic ladders which encourage more contributions if people get a say of where a "portion of their donation" goes.

But also keep in mind that you'd be funding an organisation that supports censorship.

The money goes to wherever the foundation think it's going to be more valuable. It may be engineer salaries, C-Level compensation or just sit at a bank as a reserve.

You don't get a saying how money is spent by any non-profit if you donate it. If you don't agree with how the non-profit spends their money don't donate.

They’re not podcasts if they’re behind a paywall. They’re commercial shows that happen to benefit from the conflation. They are broadcasts and you are right to be concerned when a company supposedly selling commercial-free access to music starts providing anything beyond music.

I don't see how claiming that Mozilla is insane helps this cause.

I'd assumed these were concern trolls just trying to attack people they've been trained to hate for no reason by propaganda.

If these commenters genuinely think they're helping the open web with these comments then that makes both my brain and heart hurt.

They didn't get competent leadership though...

> This is assuming that you actively want to purchase MDN Plus. If you don't care about the perks but would purchase it solely as a donation, then it's understandable if you give a higher scrutiny to charities than to sellers.

I would bet you that most people are in the latter group, not the former. I certainly almost never purchase such services from ordinary companies, as I don't see sufficient value in them.

>Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or business they make to this degree?

If they did, the donations to some charity type orgs would probably drop to 0. Lots of unhappy people about the pink "awareness" org and others that spend as much money doing the events and paying for staff than doing anything else. Yes, we're "aware" of breast cancer.

For this to be an accurate comparison, there should be two free sources of peanut butter, one that I want to donate to because it helps keep the peanut butter playing field level, while the other has a massive majority of the peanut butter market and uses that to do various anticompetitive things. But the one I want to support doesn't accept donations, only the parent conglomerate does.

In 2010 it was a tenth of a billion dollars. If any public company went from revenues of $120 million to $560 million executives would unquestionably get a raise.

And then when the revenue goes down to something like $400 million, you'd expect something like the CEO stepping down and the number of executives getting cut. Like what happened with Mozilla.

It's the US median salary. If you're outside of SV and NYC, as a new grad you're looking at $60-70k, with no bonus and no stock (because outside of tech 99% of companies don't give their employees stock until they're at the director/VP level).

> It looks like Mozilla's average SDE salary is about $120k, so yes.

I'm not sure where you're getting that number, but it's much too low.

The figures at https://www.levels.fyi/company/Mozilla/salaries/Software-Eng... better match what I saw when I worked at Mozilla.

You can compare compensation at equivalent levels for Mozilla and peer companies at https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Mozilla,Microsoft,Apple,Goog... . You'll see that Mozilla pays well, but significantly less than them.

I will. As soon as they allow me to pay, because I do not plan to move to US or Canada.

> Today, MDN Plus is available in the US and Canada. In the coming months, we will expand to other countries including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore.

Who owns the foundation?

If they said you could donate on top of the jar price to help the poor third world peanut farmers, and you did so, and then found that money went to the CEO's salary and a rebranded PeanutVPN product, and then the Peanut Butter CEO justified it by saing that Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella get paid a lot so it's not fair if they don't, would none of that that annoy you?

No one. It's a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

It isn't just "Mozilla Execs", it's specifically Mitchell Baker[1] because of:

> "In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.""

> "By 2020, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.[15]"

That is, the people who developed one of the more hyped new programming languages of the last decade were let go, the main MDN team is gone, FireFox OS is gone, long-standing FireFox loyalists were given reduced customisations and a move towards a copy-of-Chrome-but-worse experience, marketshare is down enormously since the peak, there's been a churn of janky also-rans like promoting Goya beans or something, who even knows.

What have other CEOs done to justify their salaries? Microsoft's share price is 7x higher since Satya Nadella took over. Tesla's share price is 15x higher since 2018. Amazon's share price has almost tripled since 2018. Apple's share price has more than tripled since 2018. Facebook almost doubled since 2018 (but has fallen some). CEO thinks it's unfair that other CEOs get paid more??

It's not even uniquely greedy, if the service is going well. I am annoyed at travel tickets for trains in the UK which are more expensive than flying, often late, all too often don't turn up at all, often crowded to the point of cramped standing room with the argument that "our contracts prevent us buying more carriages". If then the CEOs were saying "it's unfair that well run travel company CEOs earn more, so we're going to raise our salaries" that would be annoying. (They probably even do say that, but they have the decency to keep it behind closed doors, or to make up something about doing a good job).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

But she’s the chairwoman and has full control. I think we’re arguing semantics here.

She controls everything. Including her own comp.

Paying Mozilla is mostly a donation, not a purchase. It is reasonable to scrutinize on the accountability when it comes to donations, even for normal donors.

I do have a regular donation to the Mozilla Foundation but I too wish I could chip in specifically to Firefox proper.

That's not how non-profits work. There's a board of directors:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/leadership/

If the board were to decide that Mitchell's time as leader was done, they could do so.

Criticism is not always respectful and it stings more often than not but it’s important to long-term success. What would help the open web even more would be to address issues instead of asking that no one brings up. (You’re also very much allowed to be tired of reading it over and over without it being invalid.)

It’s completely fair game to criticize the overhead costs of charities: it’s one of the most common things to criticize about charities, in fact.

>What have other CEOs done to justify their salaries?

Using the same timescale as the Wikipedia article, 2008 to 2018, Mozilla's revenue had risen from $78.6 million to $436 million. A more than 400% increase. Does that justify her salary?

Using the same timescale, Wikipedia itself (the Wikimedia Foundation) went from $5M revenue to $120M, 24x. [1],[2]. During that time the Executive Director's salary went from $168k to $387k[3]. At the end of Sue Gardner's leadership in 2014 there was a question about her $300k salary[4] which included the response:

"(2) Retention bonus to compensate Sue for lost opportunities during the transition period: $165,000."

This seems to undermine Mitchell Baker's reasons for her salary increase, doesn't it?

Wikipedia also gets a slightly higher score from CharityNavigator than Mozilla, edging them out on more efficient earnings, lower admin overhead, but far ahead on "growth of expenses": https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703 vs https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200097189

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/#sec...

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

[4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...

The Wikimedia Foundation is solely a charity and makes it's money from donations. The Mozilla Corporation makes it's money from the contracts the executives negotiate. None of the board members of the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the corporation, receive any salary from the Foundation.

They're not really comparable organizations. The corporate comparisons you started with were closer comparison, though Mozilla has some unique circumstances.

> FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%.

FAANG & companies that pay similarly employ something like 8-10% of the engineers in the country, so this is an enormous overexaggeration. We can quibble about whether it's reasonable to represent that as "industry standard" or not, but it's not such a drastic outlier that it becomes unreasonable to use it as a point of reference when discussing things that might be reasonable to aim for (or expect, in certain contexts).

I feel like you might be missing the point I'm (and GGP's) trying to make. If you're considering whether to give your money, why would you focus on exec salaries rather than results? So the comparison is: if you're buying a jar of peanut butter, why would you focus on what their execs are paid, rather than the peanut butter it will get you?

(And to pre-empt that: I'm not saying you can't criticise results. I'm saying that focusing on exec pay rather than on results feels misdirected.)

Like I anwered to a sibling comment of yours, I'm not making a point about whether Firefox fits the bill; I'm trying to say that focusing on exec pay, rather than on whether it does fit the bill, is probably focusing on the wrong things.

Do you refuse to buy a drink or a pair of shoes or a travel ticket unless you can ensure that "not a single cent goes to execs" who get "absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down"?

No, I'm normally not that picky (or actually not that well informed, which would be a prerequisite), I just avoid anything from Nestlé, I'm subscribed to /r/FuckNestle/ on Reddit to spot their many subsidiary brands I would not be aware of.

I indeed don't care at all about the MDN Plus perks, it would just be a donation to keep a browser alive. I would hate it if the money did NOT go into keeping the browser alive. Current execs are killing the company while pocketing insane (market competitive, sure, but incommensurate with the absolute lack of success in their leadership) salaries, while devs are being let go. I can't support this status quo with my money.

> So the comparison is: if you're buying a jar of peanut butter, why would you focus on what their execs are paid, rather than the peanut butter it will get you?

I think we both agree on this. What they pay their execs is irrelevant. What I'm saying is, I'm not buying peanut butter, it's available for free. I am considering donating money for the peanut butter I already get for free, but the grocery conglomerate that accepts donations on behalf has already fired half the peanut farmers, and discontinued the Crunchy variety that I really liked.

I usually bring this point up when discussing donating to charities, so I'd say: you're not buying access to MDN for yourself, you're buying it being available for free to the world.