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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, nob

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.

Androider 6y ago
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.
kybernetikos 6y ago
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.