Comment by ixmatus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ixmatus | Hacker News Reader

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I am not happy with it at all.

You know what he could do with the millions Tarsnap could make him? DONATE IT TO FREEBSD. How about that being Geek2Geek? How much more better off would the world be if Colin donated $500,000.00 of his surplus income from the business to the FreeBSD foundation? Or the Python foundation? Or THE FSF?

It's infuriating how blind many intelligent people are to how much better the world would be if they allowed more money. I don't care if that ends up being them buying a new house or donating it or building another amazing business or having the money to live while they write more amazing open source software.

What if by making more money Colin is able to start another business that does unknown and amazing things for cryptography! The possibilities are endless and makes me SO ANGRY that people with such amazing knowledge and skill that is so much more than mine are SQUANDERING IT BY THINKING THEY ARE DOING THE WORLD JUSTICE BY NOT CHARGING MORE MONEY!

If you are paying less, you can do all those things.

No. You cannot.

Do I donate money to certain projects of mine? Sure. When did I donate the most money? When I billed a private equity firm $300.00 per hour for development work and had a surplus of $15,000.00 dollars. I gave quite a bit to the FSF and others.

Do you really think that by charging the PE firm $50.00 per hour I would be enabling them to donate to the FSF? FreeBSD Foundation? Haskell? GNU? Do you even think they would or care? I certainly wouldn't have enough money to do so at that rate, but I did at $300.00 per hour.

Highly naive my friend. I'm sorry to be offensive but I'm sick of my intelligent peers (sometimes even more intelligent) squandering what is, a massive opportunity sitting in front of them that is being ignored for a totally ridiculous noble cause when their "noble causes" could be enhanced so much more without an iota of evil behavior.

Tarsnap isn't going to become an big evil corporation by charging more. It might if he decides to sell it, but I doubt that. It would be enabling him to do even more amazing things for software, geeks, the world, whatever. Those amazing things could be donations to enable OTHER brilliant people or it could be a new business, or new features that make backups a better experience, or it could be starting an R&D lab for crypto that pumps out purely Open Source research on cryptography that makes its way back into Tarsnap or different business.

Patrick actually answers this point. The shorter is that while people are free to spend as they please to charities, businesses usually don't. He goes on to note that businesses have very different value structures. This means that while I may consider a hundred buck real money, an enterprise business very likely will not. The final bit is that businesses value some things disproportionately highly compared to the trivial cost of it. There are plenty of reasons for this that he makes clear.

But that value is for that service, not a charity. It will never get redirected otherwise. So getting a business to happily pay a large sum for a cheap service is a fantastic way to ensure you now have the money to donate, and likely an order of magnitude more.

This is also the reason he says to charge $500 a month, but to give away the service to them that need it. Because the business is effectively subsidizing the needy here, while itself provably working in it's own interest. This is pretty win-win if anything.

Or increase your salary and use the surplus to donate. But really most of that profit should probably be directed to improving the business, or R&D that goes back into the business (which can be opensource!).

Anothing thing he mentioned which I think is really important here is that a business (at least his own) cannot make a donation, that's an unnecessary business expense. It seems important to understanding his view - he wants to pay more for an even better service but literally cannot do so legally.

My question here is: why can't a business make an "unnecessary business expense"? Are businesses legally forbidden from doing so? Really? Why?

Or does it just mean that the business can't deduct it from its earnings for tax reasons? In that case, why doesn't the business just pay the extra tax? In my eyes, there's nothing wrong with paying tax.

I just cannot understand why anyone would make a rule against such a thing.

(Note: as you probably already understand, I do not run a business.)

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