M Taylor wrote: > On Fri, Jul 12, 2002 at 11:33:52AM -0400, Matthew Rice wrote: > > Anthony de Boer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > It would be useful to have at least one entity in the Canadian > > > Open Source community that can give charitable-donation tax receipts, so > > > that those who are motivated can financially give back to the community. > > > > Would it be that useful, really? It's the tax credit capped at 17%? Someone > > with qualms about donating $1000 without the tax credit could just give $830 > > instead.
I believe it's the first $250 that's capped at 17%, and the next couple of thousand at 26 or 29%, but I have to admit that for the last couple of years I've let an accountant do my taxes and saved myself from the annual night of frustration filling out the forms. I understand that people have varying positions on donations, but I've always tried to support church and cultural groups that IMHO were doing good things, and that line on my return does reduce the amount the government gets by a noticeable amount. > It's also a trust issue, since the tax records are available for > registered charities and they may be audited by CCRA, there is the > appearance of a "clean" oganization. > ... > For a charity, I suggest a seperate enitity, e.g. "Canadian Open > Source Development Fund", which would a charity group, designed to fund > Free Software / OSS development and documentation in Canada which > provides benefit to Canadian businesses and individuals using Linux. It indeed might be useful for that to be a separate foundation, simply so that its affairs are as simple as possible and it only performs legitimate and open charitable-money functions. Its directors would have to be at arms-length from the beneficiaries of the fund, and possibly also at arms-length from CLUE if it adopts an advocacy role. Again, we'd have to see what we can reasonably support; maybe it could do something to help OLS, or help opensource project being worked on by Canadians. I do note the OpenBSD project is headquartered in Calgary; I'm sure that elicits a lot of opinions. :-\ My main beef with BSD is that their license doesn't keep the code free; the other night I asked a BSD developer friend how many lines of his code were in Windows XP, and he thought there might be one or two. Closer to home, there's the FreeS/WAN project, and there are probably a few other things as well. Projects happening in Canada may tend to be more crypto-oriented due to US law, so that may affect perception of this foundation too. How to set our focus is a bit tricky too; Linux itself at the most pedantic definition is just the kernel, and the vast majority of the userspace code is portable to other Un*x flavours. Trusting the directors to set a reasonable scope would be one thing, and it should be possible to earmark your donation toward a specific project if you feel overly opinionated. :-/ -- Anthony de Boer --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
