> This would be a great chance for Microsoft / GitHub to swoop in and maintain one of the more invaluable resources on the internet

No, it wouldn't! I don't want yet another corp running MDN who might have their own agendas, or will be just as susceptible to reorgs and layoffs.

It would be great if Microsoft, Google, and Apple funded Mozilla to maintain and improve MDN. I like the idea of a "neutral" third party looking after MDN.

That is the alternative I'd also be glad to see, I only mention GitHub because it seems to be their goal to fund and maintain open source projects that are vital, like NPM, in this case MDN is definitely vital. Although I'd expect if anybody were to buy out MDN that they create a foundation for it and donate to that foundation in an effort to make it as independent as possible. I guess MDN can someday stand for MDN Developer Network if we're lucky.

webplatform.org was a vendor-neutral response to the increasing commercialisation of Mozilla, but it wasn't successful, even with the backing of those organizations and with Mozilla having pledged support, too.

I remember thinking that the "web platform" thing seemed like a good idea, and I knew it kind of petered out, but I go back there now and it says it was around for 3 years and just Pointer Events was "Done," and you go look at the "Not Ready" HTML section and it's kind of a mess and there's double copies of all the elements, one in Japanese... I'm sure there's actually been some rot there so it's probably actually worse than it once was, but still.

What they don't seem to have done is what I sort of assumed was going to happen: taken MDN, stripped the XUL stuff out of it and just airlifted it over, then make the now-duplicated MDN stuff just redirect to this new space and shifted their efforts there. I suppose the issue is getting consensus on doing that, a big move, from the MDN side but as Mozilla (at that time) was committing support to the new endeavor, I dunno, it just seems like the thing to do.

Instead they kind of had a weak period of double effort and nobody shifted over, and this just died.

Is there a reason why this can’t be a group of volunteers who run it, or even those developers spin off their own foundation who would take donations ?

it is wiki and they do welcome edit contributions. Until now there was no need, I don't think anyone thought Mozilla is not up to the task of maintaining it. I would happily donate to a foundation independent of Moz dedicated to maintaining MDN.

This is something else I've thought about cause I don't know if a subdisiary of Mozilla is guaranteed to not have its finances pillaged by the parent.

Because getting paid to do good work is a pretty rad idea?

With the quality of content on MDN and detail, I can't imagine how much time is spent working on it from all sorts of angles. It's probably a full time job.