Can I buy something rather than donate ? Its hard for me to donate using my company account - but very easy to buy stuff. It doesnt matter even if its a license to email you 10 times a year.
That's a good point... We totally underestimated the shipping costs, and as a result, we've got boxes and boxes of the things around! I'll try to add it to gumroad today.
We looked into creating plushies, but unless you order them in lots of 1000, they are incredibly expensive to make. And since plushies are bulky, also very expensive to ship!
You're not fooling anyone. You're assisting your user in navigating organizational complexity required to pay a preferred software vendor.
At my previous companies, the only thing I would need to purchase software was an invoice/receipt I could point to to show that I had purchased a software license. The contents of that license don't matter, and in fact, I even told a few projects "Please invoice me for a commercial license of your software. If you don't have a commercial license, I will accept your existing [e.g. MIT] license as a commercial license. If you do not have a price list already, I will accept a quote of $1,000 without any further negotiation required; just send me an invoice for it."
I think that software developers are really weirded out that the same bits can be free-as-in-beer and _also_ cost $1,000. [+] But _software buyers want to purchase outcomes, not bits_. The outcome I want to buy is "$PROJECT continues to exist in the world." I have sufficient internal authority to purchase this outcome, as does the other commentator on this thread -- we've announced that fact loudly, as does anyone else who either requests a quote or actually pays you. I have sufficient legal authority to purchase that outcome as an officer of the company I was employed at, which enjoys an incredible amount of discretion in how it chooses to spend its own money in the pursuit of its legitimate business objectives, and which has chosen to invest that discretion in me. Reasonable third parties might disagree with our expensing policies (or think they shouldn't have hired me), but reasonable third parties don't get a vote.
[ + ] I sold trial-based software, and a fair bit of it, for many years. The difference between a trial version and a registered version was... nothing at all, if you just compared the binary artifact. The sole thing that distinguished the two was that, if you proved to the software's satisfaction that you were a paying customer, it would act like it was registered (displaying that fact and removing the trial limitations). This was, literally, a single if statement.
Could I have sold software on that same model without the trial limitation at all? Clearly yes; registration would then only cause the software to display you were a registered user. Could I have sold software on that same model with the only display that you were a registered user being outside the software? Yes. How about if that were _only displayed on the purchase confirmation email itself_? Absolutely freaking fine.
None of this gets harder or legally murkier with OSS in the picture.
But I don't want to actually sell anything. I just want your money. You can get the software, working or not, with or without the money. You are telling me that in order to get your money I have to sell essentially nothing.
It's a stupid dance for a donation while we're telling the people paying that it's not really a donation. We have to fool them and pretend like it's a business transaction.
I wish we could just be honest and lose the stigma around donations.
Your code, coming from an organization that is sufficiently funded and therefore more likely to be maintain it in the future, is significantly more valuable than the identical code coming from a less funded organization with murkier future prospects. "Maintenance security", "peace of mind", "de-risking adoption for users", "ongoing delivery of feature development", or however you want to phrase it, is a product that you could choose to sell. patio11 is just telling you the language that businesses and their accountants speak - documentable expenses = YES, donations = NO.
It's not easy. Or if it is, would you do it for us? There's really no "us", it's just a bunch of people together on the internet. Except for write access to our website, you're as qualified and authorised to do the legwork as I am. Even receiving donations is complicated, which is why we're grateful that the FSF does it for us.
I've also heard mixed reports about whether this would help with a revenue stream or not. I remember hearing organisations that set up this fake-purchase process but didn't really get that much more money than just plain donations.
Why dont you write in to https://stripe.com/atlas . It is run by @patio11 - the resident god of running self-sustaining software companies. I dont know of anyone better to either help you or advise you.
We all want you to succeed. Trust me - it may feel we are condescending, but it comes from a desperation to not see great open source software die. So please excuse my language if it offended you.
I'd always be happy chatting with an OSS project about monetization options -- email me any time, work-related or otherwise. I should also write about it a bit; thanks for reminding me to do so.
Minor corrections:
a) Atlas is built by a team of smart people.
b) Although I appreciate the praise, I am just an entrepreneur. There are many on HN and elsewhere who do that better than me. I get mildly frustrated by how we sacralize the mechanics of business, because this is one of the reasons why smart people who know what compilers are come to believe that a sales tax filing is an impossibly high barrier.
I firmly believe that anyone capable of writing a meaningful software product can run a company. We're trying to make this radically less daunting than it is right now; if particular problems about running a company (OSS or otherwise) worry you, we'd love to hear what they are and brainstorm how we could possibly help.
They provide 'priority support' by email in return for an annual license fee. They also do something about the AGPL license that they use with RStudio source code.
Not sure if this helps any and it might be worth finding out what kind of legal entity is involved &c
I am not an accountant. This is not tax advice. However, I do international consulting and have to deal with this kind of stuff all the time. Basically, for him, he needs an invoice. It should describe what he's getting and how much it costs. Then it's up to him to convince his company to pay the invoice. Whether or not they can claim it is an expense is probably important to the company, so something like a support contract is much more useful than a sticker (I really, can't imagine how to declare a sticker from a non-partner as an expense...)
From your point of view, you have sent and invoice and received funds. You need to pay taxes on those funds. How you do that depends a lot on your tax laws. Where I am (Japan), you can be self employed, in which case it is treated just like extra income (Japan doesn't have multiple categories of income, which is super awesome for getting rid of tax evasion). You can also set up various kinds of companies. These companies can shield you from certain kinds of taxes, but accounting becomes much more difficult. Usually it does not pay to set up a company in order to receive $500.
Depending on where you live, you might also be liable for VAT (or the equivalent). Exported goods are usually exempt, but exported services often aren't! Be careful! The reason for this is that value added taxes are usually only taxed once. So if you have a physical good that you are exporting, you have already paid the VAT on the things that made that physical good. Since a service is not made up of physical things, then you are liable for tax on the whole thing.
As is relevant to the original article, where you pay the tax is dependent upon where the company is base, or where the work is done. It gets really complicated from there, but basically if you are providing a service remotely (and not needing a work visa to provide the service), then you are performing the work in your country (even if you are working over the internet) -- or at least that's what my accountant has decided.
TL;DR: giving him an invoice (especially for a service) will make it easy for him to pay you, but will make things complicated for your taxes. It only makes sense if you think you will make a lot of money.
> Whether or not they can claim it is an expense is probably important to the company, so something like a support contract is much more useful than a sticker (I really, can't imagine how to declare a sticker from a non-partner as an expense...)
+100 - absolutely bang on target.
> TL;DR: giving him an invoice (especially for a service) will make it easy for him to pay you, but will make things complicated for your taxes. It only makes sense if you think you will make a lot of money.
Question - is it easier to take and account for donations ? that's what I dont understand. In India, donations are taxable as income - in fact they are a bigger pain to account for (gift tax) than normal business income.
So the question is not "nothing vs invoice" - it is "donation vs invoice"
The whole point of this thread from Krita was that they thought they were exempt ...but got screwed badly because they ran afoul of tax laws. Is this not a case of better safe than sorry : Dont take any money ... or do it the right way ?
Well... There were complications. This service is not subject to VAT in Russia. There was no service delivered to the Foundation: the Foundation didn't get anything in return for Dmitry's work.
Oh, and in the Netherlands, donations received do not count as income. Stuff just got too complicated for an outfit as small as ours.
I submit the invoice you give me to my tax authority. Depending on where in the world you are, governments do check this stuff (and share it between themselves ).
I would urge you NOT to do this. Setting an invoicable entity shouldn't be hard - I'm in India and it's not hard here, and we are fairly at the bottom of the Ease of Doing Business listings .
Sidekiq Pro uses Plasso - I'm sure there are tons of alternatives where I don't have to email you for an invoice
IANAL, but as was said elsewhere, please don't do that carelessly. It really depends on your local law, but don't go around making fake invoices if you don't have a legal structure. Depending on where you are it would be more or less easy, but don't go exposing yourself. In most countries, those on the receiving end of a (fake) invoice have much less risk than those emitting them.
It's actually the jist of this blog post. They thought they were square, but tax authorities don't understand how open source non profits work, and they made mistake in the structure. So depending on where you are you have to make sure you stay within the law.
"It's actually the jist of this blog post. They thought they were square, but tax authorities don't understand how open source non profits work, and they made mistake in the structure. So depending on where you are you have to make sure you stay within the law."
Amen. I spent hours telling the inspector what it was we were doing, and why. And in the end, she still asked what our future profits were likely to be. It just didn't register...
