The Future of Libjpeg-Turbo

Sounds like a perfect time for that company to sponsor the project financially!

The vim docs on sponsorship raise that exact issue(:h register{,-faq}). Being able to claim a donation is registration did make getting a donation through my employer easier for me.

Specifically, this part:

    What is the difference between sponsoring and registering?
    
    It has a different name.  Use the term "registration" 
    if your boss doesn't like "sponsoring" or "donation".
    The benefits are the same.

I'm not sure if continuing to use the term register versus being "that guy who tries to sponsor projects" is what works now though ;)

Libjpeg-Turbo is intended for general use for compression and decompression and from the list of users [1] is far more often used for decompression. Your mentioned projects are only for JPEG (re)compression, which is something else entirely.

[1] https://libjpeg-turbo.org/About/Software

For non-businesses, I think one thing that would make donations a lot more attractive is if they could be made to a tax-exempt org (that means I can donate more at the same cost to myself, or donate the same at lower cost). But I get that something like that is hard to set up for someone who is already under water funding-wise. It would be great if there was an umbrella org that could handle this, perhaps for a fee/percentage much lower than what is usually "lost" to taxes.

patio11's comment is about donating vs. paying by a business entity. Something I hadn't considered is that a business (even if it's just a one-person developer who has incorporated) can pay for software tax-free to any org as long as it's an actual business expense, since businesses (at least in the US, and I assume in Japan as well) are taxed on their profits, not on their gross income.

Patrick's issue with donating as a business makes sense: the tax authorities will look at a donation and think it's a part of a tax-avoidance scheme, but if the business pays for a license to software (even the payment is essentially a part of a custom license, and the software is also available for free under the same or similar terms), and has that payment documented, it's fine.

Strange thing: Open Collective's offers fiscal hosts for simplifying paperwork, but if you select the Open Source Collective as your fiscal host, donations are not tax deductible because they say "the IRS doesn't consider software development a charitable act" or something. But there's so many software non profits in the US and I really don't understand that claim.

So Open Collective has another fiscal host for charities and those donations are tax deductible, and I'm now trying to figure out what the difference really is as I'd like to set up my own charitable organization to fund a farming robot I am developing.

Anyway I could almost just say Libjpeg-turbo could set up an opencollective as their whole mission is to solve the paperwork problem for open source projects, but for whatever reason their open source software donations aren't actually tax deductible...

Does anyone here know about this IRS issue?

> I get that it's not trivial to set one of these up (especially for someone who is already in a funding deficit), but I think it would make donations a more attractive option for people.

Is there any sort of general purpose tax exempt org for funding free/open-source software development? Someone makes a tax-exempt donation to that org, earmarked for a particular project, the org forwards the donation to that project as a grant (minus a deduction for admin costs/etc). Then on-boarding a new project would mean just getting that project approved as a grant recipient with that org, which presumably would be a simpler process than setting up a tax-exempt org from scratch.

> but I'd frankly prefer to donate to tax-exempt orgs.

I would prefer to buy a new car from a "tax exempt org" to maximise the "effectiveness to myself" of my purchase.. That's just not the way the world works though. libjpeg-turbo isn't developed by a tax exempt org, and nothing that _is_ developed by a tax exempt or is a practical replacement for it.

If you want lib-jpeg to survive/thrive, donating to The EFF or The Red Cross isn't going to help, no matter what your personal preference for donating is.

(You don't have to agree with the assumption that a single-developer open source software library should provide income to keep the developer's bills/rent paid. But you do not get to make demands about how that dev structures his personal finances either. If he says "no more work unless more money comes in", you can choose to send him some money to help, or to allow him to freeze/abandon the development. Arguing about his tax exempt status is just being dishonest about you choosing to not send him money. Not funding it is fine. Don't hide behind some meaningless 'effective "cost" to myself' excuse for not doing so. Not unless you're prepared to set up a tax exempt foundation and guarantee him a salary from it...)

They received a MOSS grant once upon a time.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/04/10/mozilla-awards-3650...

That said, given Mozilla's current financial troubles, it seems pretty unlikely they'd be in a position to hire.

That's literally the actual title of the posting.

I've seen a number of similar postings here, with similar titles.

I agree that it doesn't necessarily convey the stated goal of the posting, but I wouldn't call it "clickbaity."