Has there been any progress on this goal? I am in Canada and am interested in contributing this way. Some employers offer donation matches for charitable organizations.
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I would hope that foundation does not obtain a tax-deductible charitable status in North America. The result would be corporations diverting profits away from taxes and towards paying cheaper developers in Europe. In Europe NGI is funding NixOSĀ with public money after-taxes and in the US the National Science Foundation can ostensibly do the same.
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The Foundation doesnāt pay any developers right now, does it? It mostly pays for infrastructure and provides financial support for some events. If private companies donate money to that purpose, which everyone can profit from for free, that seems like a fair deal to me.
Of course it would be bad if the owners of some companies that are also on the board would use that as a way to avoid paying taxes, but just the fact that thatās possible doesnāt mean it will happen.
Iād also be happy if the donations I make to the foundation are tax-deductible, it means that more of the money I spend gets used for the purpose I spend it on. Though I live in Europe, so that doesnāt fully apply to your argument.
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I think companies should ādonateā to the NixOS foundation if they benefit from NixOS. I as a USĀ citizen I would benefit from companies paying their taxes, but if the donation wouldnāt happen without a tax incentive, I suppose I would benefit more from a donation as a member of the affluent developer class than the tax would benefit me as a common citizen.
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@ehmry I agree with your point as a matter of principle. But my experience of fundraising for charities suggests that most people (and I bet also companies, although my experience is more with individuals) will only give any significant amount of money to tax-deductible charities. So, even if it would be good to campaign against the whole system, there is at least the silver lining that weād be taking mainly money that was never going to be taxed whatever we did. Probably.
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lol! i like what you did there!
I apologize for jumping in late to this thread as I was dealing with a few unexpected events during October.
Going to try and answer a few of the comments:
@Lyndeno Iāve met with multiple legal teams and it seems that the process for Open Source technical non profits has had a slight change with a significant lowering in chance of success. Therefore Iāve moved this to a P1 (mid pri) based on that feedback from legal counsel. I plan to check on this again with at least two different firms in Q1 2024. Open for thoughts or feedback!
@ehmry Iām curious for more thoughts on this and your perspective as Iāve been viewing the benefits to the community to obtain a tax-deductible status as quite high since itās a prerequisite for many companies when making more significant donations.
@iFreilicht The foundation has historically only paid to ākeep the lights onā ā Infra/financial/legal/community support. There are multiple discussions happening right now around the funding side across the community (notes from NixCon discussion groups NixCon Governance Workshop - Announcements - NixOS Discourse). The way I currently perceive it is across two areas:
- As we scale we are going to need more support/efforts to go into making our infra/ākeeping the lights onā scalable and sustainable. The main example on my mind for this is our S3 Cache ( NixOS S3 Short Term Resolution! - Announcements - NixOS Discourse) where the foundation support fund developers to help provide a long term solution in a shorter timeline and this is why we have a set aside budget. This goes back to the main goal of the foundation to support Infra and make Nix live another day
(ideally many many days). - Thinking through how we can best utilize funds to scale/support/empower individuals, teams or areas of the Nix ecosystem which is what is being discussed in the various community threads.
@ehmry On the topic of āI think companies should ādonateā to the NixOS foundation if they benefit from NixOS.ā I very much agree with this and community teams have had discussion on the topic as well which are still open (part of the link I shared above). Curious if you have any thoughts on how this should be communicated to companies. Do you think we should have something more formal in place?
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