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

I have a better idea...

[Otter]

Instead of coming up with better ways to waste money at the end of the fiscal year (incidentally, everybody's fiscal year doesn't necessarily end in June):

Does anyone's company have a practice that eliminates the incentive to waste money this way in the first place? 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?

Re:I have a better idea...

[Otter]

Sure, I understand the rationale for it. The question is whether there's an alternate budgeting system that doesn't create an incentive to hold an end-of-year blowout. I can't believe no economist has ever taken a shot at this problem.