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Open source versus closed source is not something a business cares about, but it's something employees care about. The price isn't terribly relevant either, nobody is exactly pinching pennies - my business trip per diem is higher than the donation cost above!

But spend has to be justified. There needs to be a paid version with at least one functional change for a business to be able to sponsor it.

We can bullshit all day to finance about it being a "business need" for... I don't know, dark mode, or for the table to list IE6, or a breakdown by country, or something that most users won't miss. But it has to be present, so we can make the case. It can't be a donation, it can't be optional, and we need to get something out of it. That's the only way to get businesses to pay for open source.

Yes, companies have no problem paying for tools and resources, just don't call it "supporting open source" or a "donation".

Give everyone free access to MDN for X articles per month, New York Times style. Then sell a MDN Pro subscription with unlimited access and exclusives for $39/mo/user or $399/year. There's tons of examples in the cloud space of this working, like Linux Academy's online training or A Cloud Guru etc. that are making millions per year.

Just for reference, a MSDN subscription is $5,999 the first year and $2,569 for a renewal (but does come with a ton of stuff)... None of this 50-100 dollars per year or you're just setting yourself up for failure from the start.

With code, there's often a dual license approach - a free license that is unpalatable to business (e.g. GPL), plus an option of a paid license that is more acceptable to businesses.

Perhaps a similar approach could work for MDN.

I think making employers pay for it can cause the cost to be too high. And still there'd be thousands of small-medium companies, schools, and universities who won't buy the subscription - the majority of the population won't have access to it.

I believe it HAS to be kept free for the general public, no matter what.

I totally agree with this. I should have clarified that when I say "funding open source," I think of that differently from "paying for software/resources" - this would not involve paying for access, just paying for continued development and maintenance.

Of course, as other commenters have been pointed out, it's hard to sell companies on paying something they "have" for free. Which is why companies will shell out big money for the O'Reilly Learning Platform or MSDN ($500/year/seat for the former!) but not even think about spending money on a community resource.

By comparison, employers routinely pay for MSDN.

You don't need to buy an MSDN subscription to read or contribute to https://docs.microsoft.com , whose pages are free to read and are increasingly becoming open-source on GitHub.

In fact, Microsoft now calls MSDN subs Visual Studio subscriptions, to emphasize that the main reason to buy one is to get premium VS features and personalized developer support.

> Their employers, big or small, should be the ones paying for it.

The people providing the service should get paid. Who bears the cost in the end, and whose credit card gets billed, are just implementation details. Choices for employers and employees to make among themselves. The provider doesn't care. The provider gets paid.

Employees will like to read that employers should pay, because they don't want to pay. Nobody likes to pay, including employers. But in the end, employers pay employees for value delivered. If that value includes the benefit of a service that costs money, it's part of value delivered.

Maybe the employee pays and the employer reimburses. Maybe the employer pays and the employee's pay, benefits, or expenses allowance gets docked accordingly. Maybe the employee and the employer split the cost somehow. Maybe the employee bears the cost entirely, so employees who can do without the service have financial incentive to do so.

It's not up to the provider to figure this out or negotiate it. If diners want to argue about who pays how much of the tab, the restaurant still gets paid. If tenants want to argue about who pays how much of the rent, the landlord still gets paid. In the USA, auto mechanics usually own their own tools, while in Germany, garages usually provide them. Either way, the toolmakers get paid. They don't wait to get paid until employee and employer figure it all out.

Employees paying might make sense if the employees were paid on some sort of commission basis. Then it’s in the employees personal interest to find ways to make themselves more efficient so as to maximize their own income. But for a salaried employee, there is not enough incentive for them to pay out of their own pockets.

Basically the statement you made that employees are paid based on value delivered is not really accurate in most cases.

Not sure why government isn't a possible solution too.

I feel like we should get to a point where it's common for companies to give their employees a donation budget to spend on whatever they see fit.

You mean a salary?

I think he means an amount that employees are allowed to spend to support software they rely on but not keep for themselves.

A salary is something you trade for your work, i.e. it's for you to spend as you see fit. This budget would be for the employer to spend, but for the employee to determine how it would be best spent to benefit the employer. It's not a job perk, and not to the benefit of the employee.

I very much enjoy the way you speak about this. Workers determining resource allocation is classical socialism, so the politics would derail the idea in many places. If no one ever points that out though, and you focus on a voucher system rather than ownership, it is actually capitalist but still trying to get at the gains of distributed leadership.

Well... Maybe, if you squint at it. But the donation budget would be orders of magnitude smaller than your salary, let alone the company balance, so in my view it would require some creative reasoning to see that as full-on socialism.

(But then I live in a country where unions are normal, so I can't speak to how it would be perceived elsewhere.)

Usually the provider of a system or a standard also provides the documentation. Should my employer also pay to keep MSDN c# docs up to date? Or should that be the task of microsoft employees?

Microsoft gates plenty of training content behind Visual Studio subscriptions. Also, who is the "provider" of the web platform?

The provider of standards around the web is ostensibly the w3c, in reality whatwg or Google. Any of these three would be good candidates to run something like mdn. However that would probably make mdn more political and opinionated.

WHATWG? The group of browser vendors that agree on web standards. I think the onus is on the person proposing a web technology to document it.

The spec already documents what ought to happen, what you need is documentation about what actually happens (say, on IE11).

I get your point...

No, we at Microsoft don't make you pay for any of our own developer training material with a VS subscription.

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/benefits/#training?cat... - you can see that the learning materials you get for subscribing all come from third-party partners, from whom you could buy the same things separately.

>MDN is a reference as much as it is a learning resource..

>Their employers, big or small, should be the ones paying for it.

Your argument is counter intuitive, if it is truly a reference, then surely the developers themselves should pay for it.

A company hires a developer with the expectation that they know their field (including the standards etc.). It is the developers' own concern if they (understandably) need a reference to help them execute what they were hired for.

You describe the role of a contractor here, not an employee. The tools that I need, like a computer, an IDE, an Internet Connection, Software Licenses, and reference documents, should all be provided by the employer.

If the developers are independent contractors, sure. If they are employees, no, the employer should pay

Just like lawyers and LexisNexis and similar tools.

Many employers pay for reference materials like this. Universities and hospitals pay insane amounts of money to Elsevier, Springer Nature & Co for scientific journals, others to orgs like ANSI, ISO or DIN. All this stuff is so expensive that no one can be expected to pay it out of his own pocket.

Also bring your own chair and desk while we're at it. Oh and you definitely want to buy some toilet paper. Felix always keeps a stock on those but he never shares.

Don't forget to bring a bucket of water from the well every morning - yea we've got working plumbing but that costs money and your developer salaries are unreasonable!

If the developer is being hired as a contractor, perhaps so; this could be negotiable as part of the contract.

If the developer is hired as an employee, then in general I'd say no. It's the employer's responsibility to provide the tools and resources the developer needs to perform the job effectively -- whether that's hardware, software, documentation, or working environment.

If that is the case , Stackoverflow should not be where it is now. In every field there is lot to learn. you learn everyday.you cannot find one who knows everything. If someone says it, don't hire him

SO is the opposite of MDN. If you do not approach any piece of StackOverflow content with the presumption that it could be dangerously not-even-wrong, God bless you.