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> Charge. Money. For. MDN.

Sure, put up another barrier for those trying to learn web development.

So you want to use others' hard work for your own financial gain? That doesn't seem overly fair.

I get your point, in a perfect world folks like you might land a nice job and kick back 10k as a thanks. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen, so alternatives are necessary.

This is the exact comment I wanted to make. I rarely use MDN, but would pay for it anyway, because when I need it, I really need it and there is no high quality alternative.

You could probably donate to Mozilla Foundation and earmark it for MDN today.

I just found out that you _can_ directly pay for MDN:

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

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

Unfortunately it doesn't look like the sponsorship program is active anymore. All links 404.

Absolutely. I’d be willing to bet many thousands of developers would pay at least $5/mo for access (sign me up!). That’s at least 1 full time well-paid tech writer. And I think my estimate is highly conservative 1) I’m sure it could be more than $5 and 2) I didn’t include any corporate payments.

My build on this: Mozilla, send out a poll and see if this is something people would thrown down $$$ for.

Would you pay $5/mo to support it, even if it were fully public? or only if it goes private?

I'm pretty sure a "good enough" alternative would pickup the visibility, such as w3schools, and many won't be able to justify the expense of there isn't some kind of exclusivity.

(there could be some sort of member/sponsor program, but having tried to run those, they have alot of overhead)

Only if it stays public. It was hugely important for me learning web dev, still is, and I would like it to continue to be for everyone entering the profession

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/

Charging for access goes against the mission of democratizing access to this info. Corporate sponsorships seem like a good idea though.

> Charge for access to MDN, structure the legal particulars so that revenue goes to pay the tech writing staff, covers operating costs, and provides the excess to the Mozilla Foundation. Use the resulting goodwill and attention as a lead generation mechanism for whatever other projects Mozilla tries to create and charge for.

This doesn't sit very well with me, as someone who has written a few security-related articles on MDN and generally tries to contribute to e.g. the compat-data repository as I get time. I'm motivated, just as I would be with an OSS PR, by the work being high quality and freely accessible to all.

It's a wiki. Anyone can help contribute. Do the professional technical writers do an excellent job as changes land in Firefox? Yes. Is it fair to charge for access to contributions that both the paid technical writers and the community have contributed under the impression that this is a free resource in the public domain? I'm not sure.

Is there a middle ground whereby we can still fund hosting/maintenance/professional technical writing but give access to a) folks who perhaps otherwise wouldn't have the means to pay for the documentation and b) folks who've contributed to the resource? Perhaps.

For what it is worth, I know that as much as I find MDN useful today I recognise that I would personally find it extremely hard to justify to myself for paying for it. And I do front end dev professionally and also for fun so I guess I might be the "target market"?

It will just end up like the news sites with a paywall - "oh the want me to pay <clicks back and goes to next search result while moaning about why Google even includes these paywall sites in results>

I bet I am not alone - it is just a reference and any other site can cobble together some examples that 99% of visitors just want to copy-paste anyway so they can get back to their work or fix that weird error (e.g. w3schools)

There are also questions in my mind about who would pay: the industry veteran who remembers the days before we had developer tools, or the person just starting out who doesn't really know anything yet? Or someone else? Neither the veteran or the newbie would get much value out of that $5 in my mind, leaving only a hollow rump of the middle-ground of people who care enough to pay for access, but also don't care enough to learn so that they won't actually need the subscription?

It doesn't make sense. MDN will drop down the search rankings and some other site will provide reference material for DOM + JavaScript.

I think you have misconceptions around how much people want to pay for documentation . Usually people come across MDN docs while googling for some keyword . At times MDN is the first search result, but if the users hit a paywall, they will gladly go to the next search result - usually w3schools . It is not a definitive resource but is good enough for most general use cases.

As an example , Wikipedia is used much more than MDN docs as everybody in the world can find something useful on Wikipedia but MDN docs appeal only to web developers . Yet every year; Wikipedia has a hard time gathering donations to run their site with a skeletal crew and they have to resort to huge banner messages exhorting users to donate.

What exists on MDN today is easily worth more to an individual than they pay (in U.S. dollars) for a single coffee in a month. Putting that towards a monthly subscription for a vital resource might not come naturally to people given the present "culture of free" on the Internet, but someone has to be first.

Wikipedia doesn't "need" to appeal to users for donations. They currently have more money than they'll ever need to develop wiki and to run wikipedia. They do that so they can add more staff and more projects. Which is a mistake IMO, they should stay focused on what they do well, in turn they need a smaller amount of money every year, and because of that they could take their current principal stuff it in a trust fund, and fund themselves virtually forever. Of course Mozilla could have/should have done the same thing: stay focused on the browser, forget all the other crap like FirefoxOS and save money to put in a trust fund and eventually achieve some org level financial freedom. That wouldn't be as cool tho.

Mozilla's contract with google was just renewed, and is roughly the same amount of money they were making before. COVID had essentially no impact on their finances, and this is all corporate PR bullshit.

regardless of this suggestion, thanks for linking Dash; this looks great

There is also the open source https://devdocs.io/

Their web stuff comes from MDN.

I would pay for this as an individual.

Competent organizations would pay for this in bulk.

I don't think it's a great idea.

Some commercial model would be ideal, but having a paywall would mean that the influence of MDN on the large web developer community will become than much smaller.

That would mean less developers having easy access to information that would help create write solid, browser-agnostic websites and applications. Which will be a loss for everyone.

Except, perhaps, for Google and the Chrome team, as the makers of the currently dominant web browser.

That would explicitly go against Mozilla's goal of having an open web. A paywall for such a fundamental resource would not be a good thing.

Perhaps there should be a more direct way for people and organizations to contribute money to the docs (or a paid App or other value add) but the docs themselves shouldn't be closed off.

> That would explicitly go against Mozilla's goal of having an open web. A paywall for such a fundamental resource would not be a good thing.

It doesn't have to. The content could remain out in the open.

Although you are correct in that I am suggesting a paywall there are other ways this could work:

- Subscribers could set MDN project priorities in terms of which technologies get focus, topic expansion, expanded example code, etc.

- Early access to incomplete documentation could be given to subscribers.

- Issues with documentation or example code coming from subscribers could get priority treatment.

- Offline versions of the documentation could be subscriber exclusive.

The bottom line is that a tragedy of the commons situation needs to be avoided. Is a paywall really worse than letting bit-rot settle in on the existing MDN content?

Some of the beneficiaries of MDN are amongst the biggest companies in tech. They can afford to spare some loose change if need be.

There's no need to lockout the poor teenagers who are wanting to explore web tech for themselves.

I would also pay for it for nothing extra at all. Give paying members a special icon on the MDN discourse or something. Maybe a "Sponsored By" page you can get your name on if you want it there. I pay for non-profit news that is free to all, I pay for some apps that have basically identical free versions. Please take my money! Offering a free product doesn't mean you're not allowed to ask for support.

I would totally pay monthly/yearly for MDN

We have seen time and time again that there is a vast chasm between the number of people who say they will pay for a resource and the number of people who actually do so, when the rubber meets the road.

This is actually quite apparent on HN. There's a train you can follow. At the head of the train, going choo choo, is "I would pay $5 for this". The rest of the cars go like this:

- Oh, but not if I have to use Paypal

- Oh, but not if I have to use a credit card

- Oh, but not if I have to use a trackable payment system

- Bitcoin is trackable, Monero or never

- So I have to go through KYC just to pay Mozilla? No fucking way

- 100% of the money should go to tech writers

- Money is fungible, so how do I know they aren't just taking out other money to send this there

- Ever since Pocket, I've changed my mind

- Ever since Brendan Eich, I've changed my mind

- How is it fair that both the tech writer who wrote 20% of the content and the new guy get the same amount from donations?

- If DevTools isn't included there's no point

- If DevTools is included there's no point

And then, in the end, one guy gives like $5/month because he wants to prove to himself that he was honest.

In fact, I'll tell you what: if 50 people reply to this comment pledging $60/yr ($5/month), I'll have someone set up a GoFundMe with a goal of $120k/year to fund one technical writer full time (and his associated payroll taxes etc.). I'll match that with $5k of my own money and I'll handle full comms with Mozilla to try to get them to hire someone. So validation is 2.5% of the final sum. Show me.

EDIT: By the way if it hits 50 many days after (when I won't be notified), my email is in my profile if you want to prod.

Pledged.

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Skip to the point and set up a patron , as a node dev I would not able to do my job without MDN.

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> $120k/year to fund one technical writer full time

god, I _wish_

You wish you could be paid the benefits plus salary amounting to 120k/year for technical writing or you wish that was all that it cost?

I worked as a professional full-time technical writer, salaried with benefits and options, for four years across two companies. I exited the field entirely because even factoring the costs beyond salary I never came close to clearing US$100k/year spent on the role, nor did any of my colleagues outside of management (which notably wasn't a writing role).

There was no path toward that number without moving to what were considered "technical" roles on other teams, including when I moved into a tools development role within the tech writing team.

So I wish I, or anyone I've worked with, or any full-time technical writer I've ever spoken to, got that level of compensation for technical writing. I'd still be doing it if I'd gotten paid that much.

I'm not saying nobody gets paid that, someone probably does or I'm sure y'all wouldn't talk about it. But god I _wish_ I'd ever actually seen it, just to know it was out there.

In my limited experience, the role is titled “software developer” or similar, but is actually mostly a technical writing role pretending to be development in order to justify the necessary expense. With occasional development duties. But that’s the only context I’ve seen it approach that figure (including taking into account benefits like health insurance).

and you have my axe. Or pledge.

Please don't send Mozilla your money...everyone's donations before then went to exec millions of dollars per year salary.

Mozilla is sitting on $500M cash reserves + $500M / year from Google. Don't assign lack of money as the real reason of MDN falling: lack of product direction and leadership.

All the money this guy donates is just going to be added to the CEO's salary

If you really love MDN or whatever then why not fork it and pay for hosting its competitor. Just import all the pages to Mediawiki and put it up online.

Pledged.

As a freelance frontend developer, you only have to calculate how little you have to work to get this $60/year. So it's a no-brainer for such a valuable resource as MDN

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Yep I'd pay $60 a year for MDN.

Pledged.

Pledged, just tried to follow the links posted above to sponsor right now but it's inactive.

Love MDN, it's absolutely been some of the most valuable documentation I've been privileged to have access to during my career.

If you get it organised, I'll contribute $60/yr.

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Pledged! (My email address is available via my profile.)

But also, for the 1st part, LOL! (IMO, HN needs to learn to laugh at itself from time-to-time.)

And also, for the 2nd part, thank you for organizing this. Because I'm bootstrapping for my retirement fund, I'm not particularly flush for cash, and so too often I'm a freeloader. This is great though - I hope you get it together.

One final thought is that Mozilla executives don't really deserve to be the custodians of MDN anymore, and so perhaps as a community we need to be looking for ways to liberate MDN from Mozilla. For example, the technical writer, rather than being a Mozilla employee, could be an independent MDN contributor collaborating with Mozillla employees, and contributing under CC-BY-SA 2.5. [0]

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN/About

> Mozilla executives don't really deserve to be the custodians of MDN anymore

Whatever financial/operational reasons there were for the recent cutbacks, the current situation of MDN (and Firefox) confirms my doubt and distrust of the leadership and management. It's been terrible for their reputation.

Of course, as a for-profit, they're free to prioritize business and financial sustainability. But the decisions they implemented - and how they went about it - seemed to have no respect for what makes Mozilla actually valuable (not just in terms of profit, but in social good and long-term role in the market).

They should have started by eliminating the bloat from the top, instead of laying off hard-working teams, experts and specialists that produced the real value.

In the end, if these projects can adapt and survive, it might turn out to be a good thing, to become more community-supported and independent of Mozilla. On the other hand, it seems natural for Google or Microsoft to swoop in as "evangelists of the open web" and take these projects under their (massively funded) wings.

Mozilla has earned vast sums of Google Search money over the last decades. If that money had been invested into an endowment then Firefox and projects like MDN could have independent funding. Instead they used it on what? So now we have to donate money to an org who's executives make more each year than our home is worth? No thanks.

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