Joining the Open Source Pledge | Hacker News Reader

Joining the Open Source Pledge

blog.val.town

31 pointsstevekrouse7 comments

For some reason, I remember there being revenue or employee number requirements for participation, but I may be misremembering? Perhaps it was discussed on GH [0] but never put in place. I'll admit I wasn't following the conversation too closely but I was trying to stay in the loop.

All I can see on the website [1] right now is:

> The minimum to participate is $2,000 per full-time employed developer per year.

Is that it?

[0]: https://github.com/opensourcepledge/osspledge.com/issues/45

[1]: https://osspledge.com

Yes that's it, no minimum company size to participate. The reason to use $/dev as a metric is that it gives us some hope of comparing across companies of different sizes, though we do acknowledge different cohorts on e.g. the Members page.

This is pretty awesome. Thank you Val Town. This should be a tax-deductable/non-profit type of donation. Anybody experienced in this and know how that can work?

afaik, it depends on if the org you're donating to is a registered tax-deductible non-profit. I've personally never been able to deduct donations to individual open source maintainers, even if the donation was in the thousands, but maybe I just need a new accountant.

There's an established organization called Open Collective that can let you support various open source software projects, with the organization acting as a legal and fiscal sponsor. It's not a 501c3 but it is a 501c6.

I use the platform to support tools I like or use, like Nuxt or Tabula: https://opencollective.com/nuxtjs

You can also support some groups that use open data philosophies or methods but aren't necessarily or primarily building software, like ArchiveTeam: https://opencollective.com/archiveteam

great initiative, i wish larger companies would join

I suspect many larger companies simply pay developers to contribute features. This is orders of magnitude easier than trying to make a donation as a corporation without getting an invoice in return.

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