And the problem is that each time the software changes, attributions are lost. I used to be active contributor to MDN with thousands of contributions. Countless hours of volunteer work.
When the platform changed and my attributions were lost, I stopped contributing. I had no street cred anymore. I was angry.
The switch to GitHub means the same problem once again. Nice way to alienate your community, MDN. Good luck with that.
It should be possible to migrate to GitHub without losing attribution. I've seen scripts in the past that build up a Git repository from scratch, back-dating contributions and crediting them to the author.
Impossible unless you have a thorough map from MDN accounts to Github accounts in advance (because once published the repo can't really change much, especially in this case).
Since you probably spent hundreds of hours on this, and they are apparently in violation of the license under which you contributed this work, maybe get a lawyer and send them a letter asking for your attribution to be re-instated or removal of all the mis-attributed material?
I mean Mozilla earns hundreds of millions a year and pays its CEO several millions a year, they could have well afforded to not violate your rights by spending a few dev days on writing a proper importer scripts.
Volunteer work like that that results in visible, attributable output can become part of your resume/portfolio. You can point people to it and say, "Here are a set of articles representative of my work." Much like open source contributions (if you're not the primary maintainer of anything open source).
> Those are unpaid volunteers. If Mozilla robs them attribution for work (and yes this is work), then what's left?
Warm fuzzy feelings? The knowledge that people read your article thousands of times every day?
Honestly, while I agree that it’s a bit sad to lose the attribution, I find it hard to be sympathetic with people who get salty over losing internet points.
It’s a knowledge base. It’s well designed documentation. Something that many folks in IT lack at times. Showing people you can properly document knowledge in a collaborative way helps you get hired.
The ability to write good tech documentation is a valuable skill. I understand the GP was upset when they lost an easy way to signal they have it to potential employers.
It's mean to make fun of people for caring about things. If people are proud of work they've done, why shouldn't they be upset when they get no credit?
If your potential employer is so skeptical of you that they don’t trust you when you tell them you wrote certain articles on MDN, they’re not likely to hire you in the first place.
If you reference work you do in your own time, I will go look at it. It’s unfair that MDN doesn’t easily make note that their contributions may have been lost to the ether.
I don't mean for this to come off rude, but at some point you have to learn that spending time in life on things you don't control can have extremely negative costs.
How can you be angry? MDN isn't yours. Do they owe you something? It's volunteer work. You're not owed anything. You should consider attribution a privilege.
I don't mean for this to come off rude, but how can you be so cold? How can you lack so much empathy? At some point you have to learn that things matter to people.
Volunteer projects rely on an unspoken contract that symbolic recognition, awarded fairly, is a real motivation. And if a project wants to succeed, it needs to take that seriously.
Does the project owe its contributors anything? Legally, no. But if it wants to survive and keep contributors, then it had better damn well work hard to recognize them. The project isn't owed anything. The project should consider its free, voluntary member contributions a privilege.
> Does the project owe its contributors anything? Legally, no.
Uh, what? Legally, yes.
Why are so many people (see sibling below: "Perhaps legally, in this case, they're owed nothing") just rolling with the suggestion that this is a grey moral issue and not a legal one? It's more than a moral issue. This is Creative Commons content. Mozilla doesn't acquire ownership of project contributors' work...
Once again, we have another Mozilla-related thread where we find two "sides" of an issue, with both offering takes that reveal that neither has any idea what they're talking about. What is it about Mozilla that attracts this sort of thing?
I think it's completely clear from context that the references are to the project as a human organization, not its content. Obviously recognition is given by organizers... not by Creative Commons-licensed content, ha! Unless text has become sentient now. :)
But I don't know why you're then choosing to baselessly insult people who discuss things about Mozilla...? Call me crazy, but I don't think that's a helpful or constructive attitude here...
> baselessly insult people who discuss things about Mozilla...?
It's neither baseless nor is it an attitude that is not "helpful"—I laid out exactly what the basis for the comment is, which comes almost directly from Frank Hecker's post a couple months ago after the most recent layoffs:
> Incidentally, doing a Twitter search on ”Mozilla” gives a good feel for public perception of Mozilla among technologists, but unfortunately most of the people commenting have no real idea what they’re talking about.
On the other hand posting false or simply misleading information, whether intentional or unintentional, is unhelpful. And if it's unintentional, there are a few different ways to respond when someone points it out. One way is to feel insulted and post an emotional response. Another is something like, "Oops, my mistake. I wasn't really thinking about that when I wrote what I did, but on second thought: good point!"
I don't really know what your first two sentences about human organizations and context are supposed to mean. Mozilla does have a legal obligation to abide by the license terms—in contrast to what you wrote—and that's pretty much that.
You're right, it did start that way. And then the matter of legal responsibility was brought up; one person even posed the question, "Does the project owe its contributors anything?", and gave a direct and unequivocal response: "Legally, no." (Side note: that person was you.) And to say that is to say something that is simply not true—as untrue as any statement now about my being confused about whether legal responsibility was being discussed.
You can't rewrite history. (And we shouldn't have to replay all this. It's still all there to see...)
I don't know why you're so willfully misreading this.
The project doesn't owe the contributors anything legally in terms of recognition (or payment, etc.) which was the subject being discussed. That's quite obvious from the context.
Nobody ever brought up legal ownership of content at all -- that's 100% your misinterpretation.
It's kind of amazing how you misunderstand comments and then go on to insult others for supposedly misunderstanding comments... and then proceed to then do it all over a second time! Amusingly ironic. Better luck in the future, my friend... ;)
Sorry, that's not going to work. The comment you responded to outright said these things:
- "MDN isn't yours."
- "Do they owe you something?'
- "You're not owed anything."
... and your response? "Legally, no"—but of course the problem with that response, again, is that legally, yes; they do owe something.
So try rewriting the context and all the rhetorical gerrymandering you want, but it doesn't change that the fact that (a) there was a discussion in terms of legal responsibilities and (b) in that discussion about those responsibilities, your comments were incorrect. Being wrong because of a slip-up is fine—and it wasn't even wholly your slip-up; you were yes-anding someone else's comment. But this scrambling now to double down after it's pointed out and the subsequent projection—particularly in your last paragraph here—is more than a little annoying to encounter.
> The project doesn't owe the contributors anything legally in terms of recognition
... except they do, for the reasons already stated. Maybe there's some attempt at sleight of hand in your choice of the word "recognition" here (i.e., as distinct from "attribution", but even then, it's not clear whether any argument there, if there is one, would even hold up)—but it's not really important. Because "attribution" is the word that was used, attribution is what the BY part of CC-BY-SA stands for, and attribution is what's required by that license—yes, legally.
It's pretty bewildering that you think you have an argument here.
> Why are so many people (see sibling below: "Perhaps legally, in this case, they're owed nothing") just rolling with the suggestion that this is a grey moral issue and not a legal one?
I mean, I dedicated an entire paragraph above that comment to pointing out moral possible legal problems, and used "perhaps" as an explicit indicator of uncertainty and doubt. The moral issue isn't particularly grey. The legal one...
There are various attributions for "Mozilla Contributors". Does that technically suffice under either the license terms or in juristictions which recognize authors rights? (What juristiction(s) apply - hosting provider, Mozilla's headquarters, or perhaps the original authors?) Do they perhaps more explicitly attribute the original authors elsewhere? Certainly stripping names from an explicit copyright header would almost certainly be a license violation, but does flattening VCS history in the manner also count as one? Did CC licensing terms apply at the time of previous CMS conversions? Were there perhaps contributor agreements and/or clickwrap licensing agreements previously which would've made this legal? Are there more buried attributions which might technically meet the burden of attribution while still being done poorly enough to feel slighted? Perhaps in some juristictions but not in others?
Can you answer all that with enough certainty as to assert that you "have any idea what you're talking about"?
> What is it about Mozilla that attracts this sort of thing?
Both sides offering takes that reveal that neither has any idea what they're talking about is far from unique to threads involving Mozilla. I dare say it's not even unique to the internet.
> The moral issue isn't particularly grey. The legal one...
Also not grey—same as before.
> Can you answer all that with enough certainty as to assert that you "have any idea what you're talking about"?
Hey there. I'm a former Mozillian. I was a heavy contributor to Devmo in its early days (2006–2008). A bunch of that content is mine. It's not Mozilla's, and I know on what terms I made it available. So to answer your question quoted above (a) yes, in fact, I do know what I'm talking about, and (b) I don't have to be able to give an answer for every slot in your contrived matrix; it suffices if I'm able to say, "hey, you can't do that with the pieces that belong to me". And that's something that I can say—with certainty.
Because that’s not how the world works. This is evident by living in it. Otherwise, this wouldn’t have happened.
What’s happens in the real world is that you abide by contractual agreements and if a party breaks the agreement, you sue them for breach of contract. This also requires that you can sue them for breach of contract. Otherwise, you can kick dirt.
Yeah, they do owe something: they owe the attribution which is a condition of the Creative Commons license which is what license the content is available to Mozilla (and everyone else) under.
> You should consider attribution a privilege.
Absolutely not. That's not how copyright works. What a deluded, entitled take.
That's an absurd take on it... MDN owes this guy nothing, and this guy owes MDN nothing. But attribution, and the volunteer labor, are not part of any financial transaction, so the question of who formally owes who what is entirely irrelevant
But from the social contract, attribution is a perfectly fair expectation for this kind of work -- especially because at the time of, and even going forward, attribution was given. It may not have been codified as a public contract, but the relationship was, and is, quite clear.
And the breaking of that relationship for fairly arbitrary reasons (it couldn't be imported/converted?) is a pretty damn good reason to be annoyed -- hell, what other reason would you consider valid? If it was financial rather than social, you don't get angry, you get even (lawsuit).
Now I'm getting annoyed as I write this; its not a fucking privilege to have been given the honor of doing volunteer labor, and its not a fucking privilege to be given attribution for it -- it's like the most basic free compensation you can give for free work. It's a norm across the board
Attribution is important enough that several software licenses amount to little more than "attribute the original authors and don't sue us." Attribution is important enough that a right of attribution is incorporated into some countries copyright law as "authors rights".
Perhaps legally, in this case, they're owed nothing - but it's not unreasonable to consider stripping said attributions to be a dick move, even when legal. Maybe unsuprising, but a dick move nonetheless.
In some countries you can't even sign away the right to attribution (ianal), so depending on where the contributor resides they might legally owe them that.
The opensource ecosystem is built on a very thin veneer of perceived fairness: labor is free in the hope that it will bring you reputation (which you can leverage into actual remuneration). If you remove one side of the equation (no matter how hopeful or hypothetical that might have been in practice), the setup appears entirely exploitative, and people get angry.
When the platform changed and my attributions were lost, I stopped contributing. I had no street cred anymore. I was angry.
The switch to GitHub means the same problem once again. Nice way to alienate your community, MDN. Good luck with that.