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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.
Not true at all. The government only pays for a percentage of the cost - which would be approximately the marginal tax rate of the entity donating the code.
For example, if I donate $1 to a charity, and my marginal tax rate is 50%, I wind up paying $0.50 less in taxes than I would have without the tax deduction. I'm still out $0.50 from my own pocket.
IANAA (accountant), so YMMV.
And how many slashdotters who are NOT programmers have downloaded and used free software and never gave the authors any money for it? Isn't buying a Linux distro a way of giving back to the community if you're not a programmer.
Typical Open Source hypocrisy: Programmers that whine about paying for programs and demanding that it has to "Be Free as in Freedom" and then get pissed off because someone takes you up on that. Don't want someone to rip-off your work? Don't make it Free.
The price of "freedom in programming" is the freeloader.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I read the article, and it's one of those rare times that there's nothing much in it that isn't contained in the Slashdot summary. Anyway, isn't it totally to be expected that most companies would take everything they can get from open source, and not give anything back in terms of time or money?
But so what? What Linux needs more than anything else is to capture more than 20% of the desktop market. Once there's a foothold of that magnitude, we'll start seeing practically everything, from Doom III to Quickbooks, released in Linux.
So, as for those companies who aren't "giving back," -- I say, that merely by virtue of adding to the pool of Linux users, they are giving the open source movement exactly what it needs most.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
good point. That is the idea of free software. We talk about wanting to see linux on the desktop and more end-user penetration but what can/should we expect in return. These companies (from the article) that integrate open-source software rarely have development staff and usually have very low skilled administrative staff. At best they could submit bug reports and do testing but I think that is even a bit much to expect.
.. uhh karma event ;-)
Admittedly, everyone in the community has different motivations, but one principle of open source is that it is given away freely without expectation of compensation. Some may say that it is actually with the expectation of benefiting from others' work but that cant be viewed as a transactional event. More like a