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Comment by rammy1234 | Hacker News Reader

They need to make MDN a paid site for developers. Can work with organizations to get access to MDN content. They can accept donations or a small yearly fees. If organizations can sponser can also contribute will be a nice addition so it can keep fees minimal to individual developers

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I totally disagree with making MDN a paid site ... Are developers supposed to pay to develop? ridiculous .... MDN should be kept open to contributions and donations but putting up a paywall only makes things worse for all of science in general.

me too but how else we can save it from going stale. Even science research needs funding. If orgs can donate as benefit of its employee. If not its up to individuals

> Are developers supposed to pay to develop? ridiculous

No. Developers are supposed to pay to access the hard work of the technical writers and developers who maintain MDN. I don't understand why you think it's self-evident that this work should be free.

Here is a longer explanation by the person who created the precursor to MDN: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/i_love_mdn_...

Here is the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24159244

The W3C has many wealthy companies as participants, they should support it more too given that each and everyone benefits from MDN being the central place for all browser API reference.

I lead of Chrome DevRel team and we contribute with tech writer support and work on the PAB, it appears too little still but there are many web standards aligned companies that could provide more support because they directly benefit from MDNs existence.

Exactly... I think that each browser should be responsible for offering its own documentation on its web APIs (after all, documentation is what allows developers to develop on your platform)... This is not the case, And although some browsers offer technical help (like your team), I think that all browsers should offer both technical and monetary help to MDN, or else, each browser finances its own documentation repository.

There are two existing ways to pay for MDN, that are so well hidden that I only just found out about them:

- Sponsor for $ a month: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/payments/

- Buy Merch: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/mdn-store/

The sponsor program page there is up but the program itself doesn't seem to be anymore when you try to go through it. I believe someone else mentioned it was an experimental run in the past that got axed because nobody paid.

Please. NO.

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