Anyway I'm all for using software you pay for, because it has a higher probability of being around next year. One person donating a responsible amount is not going to guarantee that. Its a start I guess.
I think it boils down to the fact that you can have business expenses, you deduce that from your revenue and it's all good, but other than that if you want to get money out of your company (salaries, dividends, etc.) you're being taxed.
I guess the tax office wouldn't want you to just "donate" money from your company to get it out without paying taxes.
The point patio11 makes here is that as a company things are not so easy:
> 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.
("unreported income" here means money paid to an employee but not reported as income). With a proper invoice and line item, all the boxes are checked and a random audit won't fall on the company like a ton of bricks.
Even if the system handles company donations, that tends to be more complex both internally and externally than a "software license" line item, and thus to have way more overhead and to be way more likely to be refused.
Not if it came out of the company's coffers.
But yes, if you change the premise of the original comment, sure, you can easily make a personal donation to an OSS project.
I guess I think the positioning in the linked comment is bombastic, but litigating it out of context is boring.
Let's say I fix patio11's backyard patio. Instead of requesting payment for the work, I fork Django and send him an invoice for a license. He pays me thousands of dollars for a commercial, OSS Django license, and writes it off as a necessary business expense.
It's the same scam whether it's a donation or a license purchase. I just don't get the point.
Cooperations can probably only donate to 501(c)(3)s without it being considered paying someone off the books or, worse, money laundering by IRS standards.
If the project doesn't have any ability to send an invoice then they probably aren't formal enough for a 501(c)(3).
That being said, its only a few clicks to send someone an invoice in PayPal so its a little odd this is a difficult thing for an open source project to do.
Well, maybe I have... through some hierarchical, open-source, licensing "tax".