Do Companies Take Software, And Not Give?

SirDaShadow writes "The Inquirer has an excellent article that describes how companies take from the Open Source Community and how few are giving back. At the end of the article, it says it might be tax deductible. This made me think...wouldn't it be great for the OS community if we could provide a law to facilitate tax cuts to companies who give to OS, or at least make it mandatory to for-profit organizations to give a certain minimum amount and take it out of their taxes?" This piece ignores the obvious and large contributions that some companies have made in money, programmer time, code release and even just lending their name and credibility to projects like KDE and GNOME, but it does have some truth -- see for instance the Busybox Hall of Shame.

Comments

Mmmmmmaybe

[IamTheRealMike]

Well, of course there are two sides to every coin. I expect there's more corp sponsored free software hacking going on than you might think though. Remember that it's not always official - at my last job I submitted patches to various open source projects that I did on the job, because they happened to be basically what we needed and along the way I felt it was necessary to improve them. Often the only indication that they were done on paid time was that I sent them from my company email address.

Re:Mmmmmmaybe

[Cylix]

Indeed,

This is exactly the same story in my shop. Every application I have to fix and rework doesn't simply go to my personal patch folder. I would much rather have it part of a main branch so the issues gets resolved and hopefully in time it will be better then my fix.

We are actually seeing alot of vendor box's come in that use a great deal of free software and I suspect they perform similar services.

Here, I let management know that if it is under the GPL or similar license we are going to be submitting back fixes and in house scripts. Being we aren't a software shop they enjoy the exposure.

Unfortunately, we are just not profitable enough to really submit funds to organizations. I hope this changes in the future and one day I can tell management these guys really make our lives easy. It's time for a donation to the cause.

For a fact I know there are organizations who exist around Perl,Python,Sendmail (Heavily modified), etc and not one bit goes back. NDA bound not to say too much I'm afraid. However, I've seen massive scalability changes, authentication changes and whatnot. Some great work has been done in house and these companies are huge. Unfortunately, sometimes their work just doesn't conform to what people want back, but other then a patch or two I've never seen anything on the order of funding.

Re:Tax deductible

[divide overflow]

>if you donate money to a charity and then take it out of your taxes, then effectively, you haven't donated one cent to the charity.

No, that's incorrect. Money donated to charity is subtracted from the taxable income, meaning that the taxable entity only "gets back" the amount of taxes you'd have paid on that marginal income, not the full amount of your donation.

GPL in proprietary...

[SharpFang]

I personally wonder, how many "close source" companies secretly and illegally include GNU-copyrighted code in their products, and sell it without source, violating GPL, but nobody knows they do, just because nobody ever sees the source.

Of course if the source was to be ever revealed, that is some serious risk, but if the company plans to keep it always secret - why not?

[environment-friendly post, contains recycled material]

Re:How 'bout Human mindset.

[Buran]

Not everyone who uses open source software knows how to contribute back. I don't; if I did, I would at least try. (I do plan to learn a bit of programming at some point, so I still might, and there are a few bits of open source software that I use often that I'd like to contribute to.)

The chances that a corporation does have someone who can contribute are a lot higher than for an individual. My comments were aimed at them -- though you do have a good point.

R&D tax credits....

[The Lynxpro]

I believe American corporations could already contribute to open source projects and receive R&D tax credits. The only difference would be the open source project would not be "in house" but if they could show they received something from the "donation" then it should work. Then again, I'm not a tax man. Of course, if the open source project was administered by a non-profit foundation, then a monetary contribution would be a charitable tax donation (Mozilla Foundation?)...

Re:Not at all surprised.

[2nd Post!]

Because you need to keep the cow alive?

Otherwise you are held *hostage* by whoever owns the cow.

Case in point:
Apple
Web browser, Safari, using KHTML code.
Adopted the code into WebKit and WebCore, and in turn provide fixes and patches.

Apple gains a small, lithe, agile, and capable HTML renderer
Apple's contributions guarantee KHTML does not wither and die due to lack of attention as Mozilla gains steam
Secondary effect of creating a third alternative to IE and Mozilla.
Everyone, including Mozilla and IE users, benefit from the diversity and growth.

Capitalism is efficient as long as the costs are taken into effect. If the cost of Open Source is factored in and it is still advantageous, then capitalism will adopt Open Source; we see this in IBM (they too contribute patches to Linux), SGI, Apple, and other, smaller, businesses that gain from the diverse contributors and stable development practices.

Re:Free

[sfe_software]

Nonetheless, incetives such as tax cuts do sound like an interesting idea.

I agree that simply making a source-code donation (so to speak) into a tax-deductable gift could help encourage even further growth of open-source software. However, I don't see it happening unless the organization running the project were a registered non-profit outfit.

One thing in the original post really bugs me:

...or at least make it mandatory to for-profit organizations to give a certain minimum amount and take it out of their taxes?

Make it mandatory? Are you serious? I wasn't sure if you meant to require a code contribution or a monetary one.

For code, this *might* be possible if your particular license required it, and even that would be pushing it IMO. This would only work with projects that are intended for developers to use; you'd never have anyone using Mozilla if such use required that you contribute code.

If you're talking about monetary contributions, then why bother being open-source in the first place? Essentially, you'd have a commercial product, but with the benefits of a non-profit outfit. It will never happen.

IBM

[scarolan]

It's nice to see IBM putting their money into promoting and developing linux. I just saw a commercial on TV the other night, where all these different people are coming into a blank white room and educating this young boy. They teach him all sorts of things.

At the end of the commercial they say "His name . . . is LINUX". It was a weird commercial, but when a heavy hitter like IBM gets behind something the guys in the suits will start to listen. I predict that within 5 years, Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop and Office suite will be all but over.

Not everything government does is bad.

[jbn-o]

If that is the typical slashdot attitude, then good. The most beneficial thing that government can do for its citizens is to leave them alone to live their lives the way they want to as much as possible.

How ironic it is then that your response is being carried on the Internet, an extension of a network which began as a government program.

If people took your attitude around the Great Depression, people wouldn't have the large government programs that pulled them out of poverty and helped restore some degree of trust in the US government. These programs were looked upon with scorn in the 1980's when the rich were doing so well and they didn't have much of an alternative press to deal with. But today we can see the international problems caused by widescale deregulation and so-called "free-trade" agreements that encourage what many call 'a race to the bottom'.

Now that the US economy is circling the drain again, people will probably look again at big government programs to help them compete with low wage jobs overseas. Someday people will realize what's in store when you leave your economy to corporations that chase the lowest paid worker on Earth but want all the tax breaks the US is willing to give.

While obviously not everything governments do is worthwhile or reasonable, some things governments do are. And in a government where you have the opportunity to participate, as you do in the US by talking with your representatives, participating in the media, and voting, you share the task of making it better.