On Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:45:01 +0200, andrel wrote:

> Any idea who should receive the money? Chris as a sort of leader of the
> pack? So he can pay income tax on it? 

There's no guarantee he'd need to pay income tax on it.  I don't know 
what the tax law is in Australia, but here in the US, you can register as 
a nonprofit organization.  I suspect you can in Australia as well.

But if the contributions are low enough, they're not taxable anyways.  I 
know this is the case in the US - income < $600 doesn't have to be 
reported (I collected about $50 last year in book royalties).

> Distribute it to all contributors
> according to how much they did? You surely can see the problem with
> that. The only useful things I can think of doing with money in an open
> source collective effort like this are

Well, some projects do take donations.  I don't know that I'd make it 
"donationware".  One of the programs I use (the one I'm writing this 
message with, in fact) has a 'tip jar' on the website and accepts 
donations through paypal.

> - keep the website running, but that seems to have been taken care of,
> although I don't know the details.
> - award real prices in the competitions and even that may be handled
> better by sponsoring.
> 
> In short, directly financing the development is not a good idea, for
> anything else you need to create a foundation OSLT and that would
> probably cost more time and money than it would attract.
> 
> Other opinions welcome.

Financing development isn't really the issue, I think.  It's that Saul 
would like to give back in some way.  I think the sentiment is a good one 
with any "free" development effort.

Jim

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