Regarding taxes, I wouldn't worry about it.
We can channel things through my company, and the way taxes work
around here, if I get 100$ and pay 100$, I pay 0$ taxes.
That means that as the middleman, we don't have taxes to pay / worry
about.
When it comes to the individual getting the money, however, they DO
need to worry about taxation.
In Israel, as an employee, I would have rather NOT get any money (I
would have to pay an accountant to get it sorted out, which most
employees in Israel don't need to do) unless it was high enough
amount. I am assuming that some people may have similar restrictions.
My original thinking was that several committers are already
consultants/contrators, who are already setup to do this sort of thing.
To be perfectly frank, I don't really care if only a small percentage
of the committers get the money, if that means that we can get people
working full time on the project.
Stated otherwise, my goal is /not/ to compensate committers, my goal
is to /improve the project/. I think that enabling full time working
is the best way to do so.
On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 11:09 PM, Davy Brion <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
my problem with the whole thing about paying committers is two-fold:
1) the taxes... a substantial part of the money is going to be
wasted anyway, so we might as well spend it something that doesn't
require taxes... also, depending on local laws you might have a
lot of paperwork to deal with if you make extra income outside of
your regular job.
2) spreading it amongst the committers... number of commits or
line count doesn't cut it because it doesn't take complexity into
account and time spent figuring out how certain parts work. For
me personally, that's not an issue since a) i probably contributed
less than anyone else here and b) i really don't want anything for
the little i did do in the first place.... but i definitely
wouldn't be surprised if people (past, current and future
contributors) started catching feelings if they thought they
weren't given enough according to what _they_ think their
contributions were worth compared to what others received. Worst
case scenario, some people will feel slighted and stop
contributing altogether. It's a people thing... throw money into
the mix and it all turns to shit.
On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Ayende Rahien <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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.
