Comment by downvoteme1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by downvoteme1 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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