Fiscal Year Close a Good Donation Time for Free Software

Matt writes "The close of the fiscal year is a great time to encourage your employer to donate to open source non-profit foundations." (Follow that link for more information and links to various foundations.) Lots of businesses that might shy away generally from software they haven't paid for are happily using Firefox at the very least, and plenty are running free software from the GNU project -- the FSF would be happy to supply some manuals.

Comments

2cents...

[Manip]

I donate anyway... But would have ordered some t-shirts, but they are ALL so ugly... Sorry, but I just can't stand the GNU mascot... I love Tux and the BSD Devil, and would happily wear them on me... But the cow, the cow! ...

Seriously that thing needs to be replaced by something cute...

The only nice t-shirt they sell is the "Happy Hacking" / generic one. Why don't they do a design competition and bring in some money?

Re:I have a better idea...

[gEvil (beta)]

While I agree that it's wasteful and, quite simply, foolish, the basis for it is the simple notion that if you didn't need the money in your budget for this year, then there's no rationale for needing it next year. If the money gets spent in some fashion this year (it really doesn't matter how), then it can be justified as "necessary" during budgeting time for the next year. As anyone who's had to follow a budget will tell you, it's far better to be in a position of excess than it is to find yourself overbudget and having to cut true necessities.

Re:I have a better idea...

[Tackhead]

> The amount of money thrown away in this fashion is staggering and it happens in pretty much every organization, private or public. Surely some accountant, finance head or game theorist has come up with a solution, or at least an improvement, no?

If you spend your own money on yourself, you care how much you spend and how well you spend it.

If you spend your own money on someone else, you care how much you spend, but you don't care how well it is spent.

If you spend someone else's money on yourself, you don't care how much you spend, but you do care how well it is spent.

And finally, if you spend someone else's money on someone else, you don't care how much you spend, and you don't care how well it is spent. That is government.

- Milton Friedman, "Free To Choose"

Replace "government" with "any large bureaucracy inside or outside of government", and Milt was spot on. Bureaucracy is a metastatic organizational cancer; in business, it's somewhat limited by the threat of bankruptcy, and in government, it's unlimited until the society collapses.

Since we can't eliminate the problem, the only thing to do is to try and mitigate the collateral damage.

Employer-determined donations, plus employee-directed contributions, strike a pretty good balance. Yes, you're spending someone else's (your employer's shareholders') money, and yes, you're spending it on someone else (your favorite charity), but by having thousands of individual employees making those decisions, you at least get the sort of efficiency gains that come from free markets -- and if you don't like econo-speak, you can rephrase that same sentence for "swarms of decentralized intelligent agents", or "social networking".

$25000 thrown into the black hole of the government does more harm than good. $50000 thrown down the rathole of the United Way does no good, but does less harm than paying the taxes on that $50000.

But 10 $500 donations to the FSF, 7 $500 donations to the EFF, 2 $500 donations to Mozilla, 3 to the Apache Foundation, 3 to the FreeBSD folks, and so on - and for the 75 nontechnical employees out of an imaginary company of 100, 75 $500 donations to 75 separate charities ranging from the local animal shelter to half a dozen parents who set up tutoring classes for kids who would otherwise be getting shot on the street...

...that's how you spend $50000 and get some good out of it.

One guy with a $50000 budget isn't going to have the time to parcel out the cash like that, and even if he did, he's going to be sorely tempted to spend a day or two on the golf course (or on three-martini lunches) with the 501(c)3 equivalent of salesweasels who want to lobby him for a shot the whole $50000 prize.

But if he just gives his 100 employees $500 apiece, and each of those employees spends just ten minutes making up their minds on what to do with their own slice of the pie, the process of apportioning the donations takes him neither time nor effort, affords nobody an opportunity to accept any kickback more interesting than a coffee mug, and actually does some good.

Even if your only motivation is to get the tax deduction and/or burn through the rest of the budget, employee-directed contributions are a win. You get the same deduction, and spend the same dollars, for much less work, and you do vastly less harm (and even some good) in the process.