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Comment by andrewaylett | Hacker News Reader

Channelling my inner patio11: Also consider offering a support contract, or selling licenses, rather than just soliciting donations. Especially if you're already intending to offer access in return for said donations!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939

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Patio11 was ultimately asking for the owner of the free software project to emit an invoice, which has its own financial bureaucratic burden in which the owner most probably won't want to enter. Ie. it won't work because the typical free software developer doesn't want to incur into the taxes that this could imply.

For example, in Spain you aren't allowed to extend invoices if you aren't first registered as an autonomous worker (freelancer), which most people aren't because they already work for some company. But even if you did, then you'd have to pay for the obligatory social security for freelancers, which is around 260 Euro per month (so staying registered indefinitely as freelancer is not financially sensible, if you are not really doing actual contract jobs).

I would think this is similar in most other European countries, which in other words means that for the most common of the FOSS developers, writing a legally valid invoice is a no-no.

Of course the matter changes if the company doing the donations doesn't really care about the invoice being legally correct inside the country of the developer. But I wouldn't advise the developer to do things like that... (s)he would be risking a fine.

The company needs the invoice to make a payment. They typically don't care about the legal correctness. Particularly if the developer is in another country. Making the invoice look legal/official is more important than anything else.

That's what I meant in my last paragraph. There is some risk for the developer: if they are in the same country than the company, when the company declares the expenses the government can get to know that the developer is having 'customers'.

Of course we could say that "this will never actually happen", but if the company had to pass a tax inspection, they would have to prove all their expenses by showing the corresponding invoices. And this would show that the developer has been generating irregular invoices.

I don't know for bigger companies, but as a (proper) autonomous worker in Spain, I had worked for just 1.5 years and already was asked once to prove some expenses with the corresponding invoices.

A company can't pay an invoice that has formal flaws (missing tax id; missing date; missing a running serial number) without risking serious book keeping problems and not being able to get reimbursed for VAT paid.

Not a single company could pay such an invoice.

(Germany, but pretty sure this applies in most of Europe)

are you sure it's 260 Euro per month for social security in addition to what the freelancers salaried company is paying?

There are some schemes which allow to save money if it's the very first time that you register as such. But they are only a short- to mid-term solution (covering typically the first year), but in the long term (starting from the 12th to 18th month) you'll end up paying the full quota.

If you can read spanish, articles such as this one explain the options: http://gestron.es/ventajas-ser-autonomo-trabajar-cuenta-ajen...

A regressive tax like this must disincentivize freelancing and thus prevent a lot of economic activity. What are the benefits?

In the UK, I'd be taxed on it, and sorting that out properly would mean having to go through self-assessment. But that's not actually hard, and while I've not needed to fill in that particular bit, the extra effort it would require doesn't appear to be particularly onerous.

I suspect that if you started getting any reasonable quantity of donations that would also pique the taxman's interest.

In Canada, if you're receiving donations as a result of work you're doing, you count as self-employed and that income is taxable -- there doesn't need to be an invoice or even an explicit quid pro quo in order for income taxes to apply.

(Fortunately the paperwork is very minimal: Basically, you add an extra one page form to your annual income tax return.)

I think back to Caddy and how they offered this and they still had to resort to that controversial thing where they started replying with a special Caddy header with pre-compiled versions of their server.

Even professionally, shops with good admins/devops will usually prefer CentOS/openSUSE over RHEL/SLES, since they can handle almost all the support themselves.

The other model is tools like Gitlab/Alfresco/Magento where the enterprise version has closed source code not available in the OSS version.

I wrote a thing about different OSS support philosophies a while back:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...

> Even professionally, shops with good admins/devops will usually prefer CentOS/openSUSE over RHEL/SLES, since they can handle almost all the support themselves.

And shops with large enough IT budgets and huge downside risk (like finance) will pay for the SLA guarantee because ultimately it's really cheap insurance against the cost of catastrophic events.

I've been in banks where the admins were the definitive authors of books written in their space, but where CentOS or RHEL on a server was chosen purely on the basis of the value of the service being hosted.

WINE vs CrossOver is another example. There's a plethora of examples available.

There's also an example of software which clearly doesn't wish to follow such scheme: IDA Pro.

Could you point me to any resources that show what such a support contract generally looks like?

It's less about what the words in the document say and more about the concept of offering technical support to your business class users.

(Obviously you want that agreement in writing, but start by just getting conversations with users who would be qualified for this. Anybof your users with 50+ employees could be good candidates.)

I kind of wish there was a business set up that would take a small cut to deal with payments/contracts etc. to do this. As a developer I'm not sure I want to deal with the headache.

You mean, an accountant?

Yeah, like an accountant that writes contracts, sets up a website to take payments and arrange consults and has a brand that large corporate purchasing departments feel happy doing business with.

So basically, yeah, just Joe the accountant from your local strip mall.

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