Ask HN: Does your company donate to free software it uses? - blubb-fish
======
patio11
We don't _donate_ to OSS software which we use, because we're legally not
allowed to.

I routinely send key projects, particularly smaller projects, a request to
quote me a commercial license of their project, with the explanation that I
would accept a quote of $1,000 and that the commercial license can be their
existing OSS license plus an invoice. My books suggest we've spent $3k on this
in 2015. My bookkeeper, accountant, and the IRS/NTA are united on this issue:
they don't care whether a software license is OSS or not. A $1k invoice is a
$1k invoice; as a software company, I have virtually carte blanche to expense
any software I think is reasonably required, and I think our OSS is reasonably
required.

I would do this more often if OSS projects made it easier for me to do so.
Getting me to pay $1,000 for software is easy; committing me to doing lots of
admin work over the course of a week is less easy. Take a look at what e.g.
[http://sidekiq.org/](http://sidekiq.org/) , which is an OSS project with a
commercial model, does. Two clicks gets me to a credit card form. If I
actually used Sidekiq, Mike would have had my credit card on file the day that
form went up.

~~~
plusquamperfekt
> We don't donate to OSS software which we use, because we're legally not
> allowed to.

Why aren't you allowed to donate?

> I routinely send key projects, particularly smaller projects, a request to
> quote me a ...

Sounds like an excuse to not donate - or did you ever get a response? Why not
just donate $100 once and feel good about it?

~~~
patio11
The company is not simply a magic mask I can put on and off at will; it is
constrained by the laws of Japan and the United States, particularly with
regards to taxes. Both countries are very lenient with regards to necessary
business expenses (必須経費 over here). Neither particularly likes arbitrary money
moving out of the company; that smacks of unreported income.

The company has books. All money into the company and out of the company is
recorded on those books, in a fashion meeting various legal requirements of
both countries. If I say "Donation" next to a line item and the NTA reviews it
they'll say "Not allowed; adjust this item to be a distribution to yourself,
pay income taxes on it, and don't do this again or we'll be very cross with
you." If it says "Software license" the 99.999% case is "Seems reasonable" and
the 0.001% case is "Random line-item audit: produce the documentation about
this", to which I say "Here's an invoice" and they say "Alrighty then."

 _Sounds like an excuse to not donate_

Again, I do not donate. I just send checks for thousands of dollars to OSS
projects.

~~~
plusquamperfekt
> Again, I do not donate. I just send checks for thousands of dollars to OSS
> projects.

Well, I rest my case - kudos to you.

Of course, you as a business owner do make money from your business, so just
donating privately remains a valid option.

~~~
kasey_junk
But the question was about getting a _company_ to donate. In the case of
"patio11" vs "patio11 llc" maybe his point seems like a polite fiction (though
that discounts the value of removing taxing agencies from the transactions and
thus generating more cash for the OSS project), but in the case of bigger
companies what he's getting at is very important.

I work for a medium sized company with sub 1k employees across many countries
and jurisdictions. Knowing when/how/where our company can legally donate to
anything is a problem at the intersection of legal, accounting and marketing,
groups I have very little influence with and even less interest in embedding
myself in. In fact, I assume there is some committee at our company for
charitable works, but I don't know anything about who is on it, how to contact
it etc. Even if I did, the idea of a) explaining what OSS is and b) trying to
argue for using our charitable contributions budget on OSS software vs cancer
research, low income literacy, or whatever else we currently support seems
down right icky.

Because you see, OSS isn't a charity for us. We use OSS to solve business
problems. It provides real business value that I (and my colleagues) are very
cognizant of and would be happy to pay for. If an OSS project had an invoice
and a credit card form my process for getting them cash looks like this
"ME:Hey $manager_type_with_payment_card give me the card, I need to spend
$some_value_less_than_payment_card_transaction_max on some software we use all
the time. THEM:Why? ME:My time explaining it will cost the company more than
$some_value_less_than_payment_card_transaction_max." THEM: Cool, here you go."
Contrast that with the above nightmare of meetings and committees and you can
understand why I don't even try to get my company to "donate" to OSS.

There is a lesson for SaaS business in there as well. A recurring charge is
much like a donation in that it requires me to navigate a lot of hurdles. A
one time fee for a time limited license on the other hand falls into the
payment card conversation above. So you are _much_ more likely to get me to
pay you $500 for 1 year of access to your software and no recurring contract,
than you are to get me to pay $5 a month recurring.

------
mr_green_tea
I successfully encouraged my boss to donate to GnuPG
([https://gnupg.org/donate/index.html](https://gnupg.org/donate/index.html))
when it was covered in the media.

But in general it seems that most business owners I worked for don't think
about that also open source and free software projects need money to be kept
alive an thriving.

------
herbst
A lot, part of our Rails team is involved in Rails development on company
time. Our python Team even took over a lot of the projects they used and
maintain them to this day. Next to creating hundreds of useful scripts & libs
which are Open Source on our own.

------
dhagz
Not yet, but we're small yet and in that final push of getting a product
built. Once that's done I can imagine there will be more time to give back to
the OSS projects that we use.

------
cdnsteve
Makes me think having a pay-forward dev rating for companies. More meaningful
than if you have ping-pong and snacks.

------
billyhoffman
nope.

