Does nobody remember these announcements from the past 5 years? Why would MDN need a subscription service? Why are Google, MicroSoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. not hosting MDN for free on their cloud platforms? Heck, why are they not fighting over the privilege to host it and put a big “Hosted on Azure” link at the bottom of every page? Why are these multi billion dollar companies not funding MDN when they claim in press releases to be sponsors? Funding MDN would be less than pocket change to any of these companies, much less all of them that claim to be sponsors.
We're long past that way of thinking. At all those companies, they are optimizing for operations not building goodwill. Honestly, this is probably more up openshift's direction right now.
Yeah if you dig up the HN conversations on these announcements people have discussed this at length.
Again though, you bring up very good points. With Microsoft and Apple specifically EXPLICITLY throwing in the towel on maintaining documentation for this stuff and pointing people to MDN it boggles the mind how MDN needs money for hosting and subscriptions to fund special content.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brings-microsoft...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/developers-rejoice-microsoft-g...
https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs/updates/introducing...