Taxes are relevant no matter what income source you have.
I am saying that we need to split it up into several issues:
* Infrastructure costs - As far as I can see, my company can cover
things like servers and such.
* Paying committers - seems to be more complex than I initially thought
* Paying other people for tasks for us - tech writers, for example.
On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:50 PM, Davy Brion <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
actually, tax is a very important issue here...
we all take licenses pretty seriously when it comes to software
(i'd hope), and getting money for writing open source software
should be held to the same standard. that means that anyone who
gets money for contributing to open source should declare that
money on their taxes... in the end, depending on the countries of
the contributors, about 20 to 40% of the donated money is just
going to be wasted on taxes.
if we spend it on infrastructure, we probably wouldn't have to
waste anything on taxes... but maybe some kind of non-profit
organization would have to be founded first, i'm not sure on that...
On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Steve Strong <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Personally, I'd be inclined to agree. As soon as we try to
split the cash, it's going to get ever so complex which was
kind of the point of my previous email - if we do want to "pay
ourselves" then we're going to have to deal with all of that
and more (don't mention tax, anyone). If we think there's
gonna be enough cash to clear our mortgages then perhaps it's
worth it, but since I suspect it's more likely to be the
occasional beer & pizza I'd rather avoid the overhead.
Having the cash to fund other things (such as technical
writers, software licences etc.) would be easier to manage
and, providing we spend it wisely, do no end of good to both
NH and the community.
I've dealt with various clubs and organizations before where
money was involved, so understand the complexity that it can
lead to. Having said that, I've never done it on an OSS
project, so I'm happy to be convinced in either direction :)
On 03/02/2010 21:22, Davy Brion wrote:
personally, i don't think the money should go to the
committers... yeah, we do work on it for free but most of us
do it because we _want_ to work on it, not because it might
someday pay some bills
i would vote for spending the money on infrastructure... a
faster jira server, a faster svn server, things like that...
On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Strong
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I think the idea is a great one, particularly the offer
to match donations - very kind! I do have a couple of
comments - firstly, whenever money gets involved, some
people have a tendency to loose sight of reality and
start seeing $$$ signs in front of their eyes. Given
that, I would suggest that we as a group define the rules
for how this works prior to taking donations - that way,
everyone (us and those donating) understand where the
money is going and we don't end up in pointless
arguments. I suspect the levels of money won't be all
that high, but you never can tell and knowing how it is
to be distributed is important. I think we need to
answer questions like:
* Who is eligible for the money? Any committer? Only
"active" committers? What defines "active"?
* How is the money split? Do all committers (however
that's defined) get the same amount? Is it split
by number of commits? Number of lines of code changed?
* Who owns the bank account? Who has visibility of
it? Is it available for public viewing?
* Do we have any other needs for money other than
just distributing it amongst individuals? Should
we keep a pot for "NHibernate" activities, such as
perhaps sponsoring the occasional conference?
Hell, if there's enough cash we could even have an
NHibernate stand! NHibernate T-Shirts & Mugs anyone?!
Secondly, I don't see why you shouldn't take a share of
this Ayende - you have made many contributions to the
project, and I see NHProf as something different.
Although your *knowledge* of NH helped you write it,
there was nothing about being a committer that made it
possible. Anyone else *could* have written NHProf
without being a committer if they'd had both the idea and
the ambition to take it forward. NHProf will make its own
money and has its own associated costs. I don't really
see the two (your commercial activity with NHProf and
your altruistic activity with NH) are related. If they
are, then any one of us that undertakes commercial NH
consultancy or writes or contributes to an NH book etc.
would also have to come under the same rules.
Any thoughts?
Cheers,
Steve
On 03/02/2010 17:23, Ayende Rahien wrote:
Guys,
I am setting up a donation campaign for NHibernate. As
part of that campaign, my company will donate 5,000$ for
the project.
Below is the text of the blog post that I intend to
post. I would like to get your comments and any
suggestions on how to make this better.
NHibernate is the most popular Open Source Object
Relational Mapper in the .NET framework. As an Open
Source project, all the work done on it is done for
free. We would like to be able to dedicate more time to
NHibernate, but even as a labor of love, the amount of
time that we can spend on a free project is limited.
In order to facilitate that, we opened a donation
campaign <http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8615> that will
allow you to donate money to the project.
Click here to lend your support to: NHibernate and make
a donation at www.pledgie.com !
<http://www.pledgie.com/campaigns/8615>
*What is this money going to be used for?*
This money will go directly to NHibernate committers, in
order to sponsor the development of NHibernate itself.
As one caveat of that, none of that money is going
to go to me personally. As you are probably aware, I
have my own commercial interest in NHibernate
(NHibernate Profiler <http://nhprof.com/>), so I
don’t feel I should benefit from the donations.
*Donation Matching*
Moreover, my company, Hibernating Rhinos
<http://hibernatingrhinos.com/>, is going to /match any
donation /to this campaign (to a total limit of 5,000$),
as a way to give back to the NHibernate project for the
excellent software it produced.
*Why should you donate?*
If you are a user of NHibernate, you gained a lot from
build on such a solid foundation. We ask to you to
donate so that we can make the project even better. If
your company uses NHibernate, ask it to donate to this
campaign.
