MDN Plus

Fundamentally, maintaining MDN is costly because of the rate of instability in rapidly changing browser APIs. Those APIs change quickly and inconsistently because they’re managed by a centralized cabal of a few corporations with a combined multiple trillions of dollars in market cap. And yet, somehow it’s Mozilla, the browser vendor with the least money, that ends up saddling the cost for MDN. Why is this?

In general, Big Tech companies should pay more into open source, and especially into the standards committees they manipulate to their own ends. Perhaps there should be some kind of NATO-like membership fee based on percent of global revenue. It would be amusing to see w3c tax these corporations more efficiently than any government has been able to.

Their biggest competitor is a major, no?

If W3C or WHATWG try to "tax" Google, Apple, or Microsoft to participate, they will lose all significance the next day as big tech starts their own exclusive group to define web standards. They completely control all influential browsers. Whoever makes the implementations gets to choose the standards.

Unlike governments, standards committees have zero enforcement power.

The standards organisations don’t have any authority to do that, and why should they? Who’s mandate would they be operating under?

I would love to see a solution like that. Or even if we could reliably tie a corporation to pay a fixed amount if they use free software would be nice.

You won’t find a satisfactory solution to this under the economic model they operate within

I agree. I have no critique of Mozilla for charging, but it's pretty infuriating that big tech calls the shots, contributes so little, and thus puts the rest of us in a position where we have to pay for the privilege of access to documentation of APIs that they define (and churn[0]). These companies really are the pits.

[0] Of course, my other bugbear here is that this constant churn adds non-trivial quantities of non-value-adding effort to my roadmap and backlogs. Again, individuals and smaller companies pay the price for big tech's high-handedness. Not cool.

If you take a follow the money perspective to understanding this frustrating behavior, you can see plainly that it is systemic and the only behavior to expect out of the economic model these companies operate within. These are not individual bad actors

Taxes are real. I even read about them in a modern economics text book.

So put the governments in charge of the standards committees.

I would personally never advocate for that, but it’s a potential solution.

Putting the government in charge of anything is almost never the right way forward IMHO

> contributes so little,

Last I looked most of the browsers were open source and being funded in the 100s of millions of dollars.

The short version: There is no particular reason to expect governments to be bad at this. Sure, they won't be able to roll out new features as quickly, but there's a lot of private-sector BS and necessary evils that they won't roll out, either, because they won't have to. The state has been in the business of establishing standards since the dawn of time for good reasons. Tech companies are incentivized to constantly release new "U"SB standards, for example, all of which improve on their predecessors in some way, but are a lot less Universal as a result. At the other end of the adapter, on your wall outlet, how many new standards for that plug have been released in the same time frame? Sure, the outlet could be a lot better, but we gain a lot in exchange by just not having the churn.

The long version: https://web.archive.org/web/20200222053906/http://slatestarc...

*major donor

Google "contributes" whatever they are paying to Mozilla every year. The reason Mozilla exists is to maintain "plausible deniability" in terms of anti-trust for the other browser "vendors", which used to be IE, but is now Chrome(-ium).

ISO is essentially a collection of national standards bodies that are often under government or semi-government authority.

>The short version: There is no particular reason to expect governments to be bad at this.

This. Look at the real NATO, when they band together and tell an adversary (Russia) not to break standards (declare war), they listen. A web NATO would be just as effective. You are right.

That's exactly why they set up Open Web Docs and this new funding stream, I think: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/03/mozilla-and-open-web-docs-...

> Fundamentally, maintaining MDN is costly because of the rate of instability in rapidly changing browser APIs.

Browser APIs change far less than the impression that most people have. (That impression is mostly the result of churn in what's fashionable on GitHub/Twitter this month, i.e. non-standards-based code from arbitrary projects that don't have anything to do with the browser except that they themselves are built to run in the browser.) Browser APIs are mostly cumulative.

The places where that isn't true are almost all experimental APIs. Arguably, these shouldn't be "advertised" within the reference to begin with—even before we ever consider the cost of keeping those pages up-to-date.

If companies are unwilling to do something that's in the best interests of their users and customers, then government is the only way to force them in a more socially beneficial way. Government absolutely has its place. Self-regulation only works as long as companies are actually willing to do what's necessary.

With respect to contributing to documentation, it sounds like at least a few "Big Tech" companies do contribute some funding for MDN content:

"Open Web Docs receives donations from companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Coil and others, and from private individuals. These donations pay for Technical Writing staff and help finance Open Web Docs projects. None of the donations that Open Web Docs receive go to MDN or Mozilla; rather they pay for a team of writers to contribute to MDN."

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

> maintaining MDN is costly because of the rate of instability in rapidly changing browser API

MDN is a wiki and maintained by innumerable contributors

You think private industry can do better? I don't.

If the (admittedly biased) reports I've heard are any indication, Putin has surrounded himself with yes-men, causing him to overestimate his chances of winning. In economic terms, this makes the war "stupid," because it lowers the utility for both sides of the conflict. Economic solutions, which work by trying to align the interests of the many with the interests of the individual, don't work on stupid people, who cannot be relied upon to act in their own self-interest.

Expecting the government to succeed in literally everything they try, even in the presence of unpredictable stupid people, is pretty unrealistic. I just want to know if they'll do better than private industry.