MDN Plus

It seems fair enough. It won't prevent anyone from accessing the actual content and it probably makes it easy to justify paying something to MDN to employers.

In practice, if you are not paying:

- Bookmarks can most certainly easily replace the Collections feature

- you can clone the MDN repository for having the documents offline

- notifications could be computed from the commit log

and the subscription probably makes these features more convenient, at least for the notifications and the offline without actually removing rights from anybody.

Seems clever.

The only thing missing from this announce is the promise that all proceeds go to MDN and nowhere else, like subsidizing a failing product or paying C-suite bonuses.

It's a wiki (at least it used to be). A lot of people, including me, spent a lot of time and effort building up the content on the site. Not for nothing—I got an intercontinental flight, a stay in a nice hotel, and a conference ticket in a new city—but many of the people who made the developer.mozilla.org content what it is are never going to see any of that money. The MDN staff, though, some of whom are almost certainly overcompensated despite project mismanagement and dubious choices on par with the judgment of Mozilla leadership itself, definitely will see some non-zero amount appear in their bank account every pay period.

For outsiders to show up with such strong opinions like yours, it feels... weird, at the very least.

Mozilla's not a cult. The users of their products are not outsiders. Having someone who worked their frame it like that really illuminates the current vibe I get from Mozilla.

I contributed without being MDN staff (which pretty much didn't even exist at the time)—that's sort of the whole point of my comment:

1. Mozilla sets up a wiki.

2. Contributors from the community work the content.

3. Paid Mozilla staff handle the infrastructure and, for better or worse, issue fatwas about high-level project direction—and, to be fair, write and edit some content, too (also for better or worse).

4. Years later, Mozilla starts a subscription service.

5. People not otherwise in-the-know show up and make weird proclamations about promises they want to be made about how/where money gets spent—with nary an indication that they understand how the content that they value actually came to exist.**

If you think my characterization of people from #5 as "outsiders" is off—(to the point of making low-effort, sanctimonious quips in defense of the fanclub's honor*)—then I don't know what to tell you except that we clearly have a different set of ideals. Whatever the case, addressing me as "someone who worked their" indicates not just that you missed the point entirely, but that you're very confused about the basic facts that form the premise of the discussion.

* this is in the middle of a discussion about a failure to acknowledge the existence of people who are actually responsible for the thing that they're fans of, no less

** see also "Who Writes Wikipedia?" (2006) <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia>