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630 points sendilkumarn | 3 comments | 24 Mar 22 16:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.463s | source
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chatmasta ◴[24 Mar 22 21:07 UTC] No.30795352[source]▶
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.

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1. bartread ◴[24 Mar 22 21:43 UTC] No.30795679[source]▶
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.

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2. wahnfrieden ◴[24 Mar 22 21:49 UTC] No.30795743[source]▶
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
3. gfxgirl ◴[25 Mar 22 00:12 UTC] No.30797235[source]▶
> contributes so little,

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