Jim Henderson wrote:
> Because you were talking about tax on the proceeds from sale of 
> products.  That's distinctly different from income.

Oh. Well, I was talking about income tax on the profits on sales of goods.

> If I sell 10,000 items for $20 each, then I'm working for a company 
> that's reporting it. 

Why do you say that?

> As an individual, it would make more sense to 
> incorporate and have the profits go to the business for reasons I already 
> discussed earlier.

Yes, but it's not required by law.

>> No.  A corporation is a separate entity.  That's orthogonal to whether
>> you need a license to do business.
> 
> It was my understanding that you had to have a business entity in order 
> to get a business license. 

You do. The business entity can be a sole proprietorship.

> K, fair enough.  When you say "involvement", I picture direct involvement.

If you set up your bylaws properly, you can just say "I followed the rules 
for setting up the bylaws."   You can do everything by mail. But the IRS has 
to at least get involved to the point where they issue the appropriate 
certification that your entity is tax exempt. I.e., they're at least as much 
involved as they are when you pay your income tax.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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On Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:12:18 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Because you were talking about tax on the proceeds from sale of
>> products.  That's distinctly different from income.
> 
> Oh. Well, I was talking about income tax on the profits on sales of
> goods.

It sounded like you were talking retail sales, not income.  Hence the 
confusion.

>> If I sell 10,000 items for $20 each, then I'm working for a company
>> that's reporting it.
> 
> Why do you say that?

Assumption that if you're selling that kind of volume that there's a 
company involved - based on previous discussion, perhaps a false 
assumption on my part.

>> As an individual, it would make more sense to incorporate and have the
>> profits go to the business for reasons I already discussed earlier.
> 
> Yes, but it's not required by law.

Yeah, I see that now.

>>> No.  A corporation is a separate entity.  That's orthogonal to whether
>>> you need a license to do business.
>> 
>> It was my understanding that you had to have a business entity in order
>> to get a business license.
> 
> You do. The business entity can be a sole proprietorship.

See, it was my understanding that a sole proprietorship had to file the 
same type of paperwork on its finances to the IRS, including salary stuff 
and so on.

>> K, fair enough.  When you say "involvement", I picture direct
>> involvement.
> 
> If you set up your bylaws properly, you can just say "I followed the
> rules for setting up the bylaws."   You can do everything by mail. But
> the IRS has to at least get involved to the point where they issue the
> appropriate certification that your entity is tax exempt. I.e., they're
> at least as much involved as they are when you pay your income tax.

See, that's not what my understanding was.  My understanding was (is) 
that the state certifies the organization as tax-exempt and passes the 
information along to the IRS.

Jim

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> See, it was my understanding that a sole proprietorship had to file the 
> same type of paperwork on its finances to the IRS, including salary stuff 
> and so on.

A sole proprietorship doesn't have salaries. It's just one person.

> See, that's not what my understanding was.  My understanding was (is) 
> that the state certifies the organization as tax-exempt and passes the 
> information along to the IRS.

That's possible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)#Obtaining_status
Depends on what kinds of things you're doing.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Pay someone, possibly outside the POV-Team, to work on POV-Ray code :)

Heh, that would be WAY more thana donation :-)

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Kenneth wrote:
> Those are my sentiments, too. The program is *so* amazing (and I spend so much
> wonderful time at it) that I would like to donate as well. Yet I see the
> logistical problems that have been mentioned here (who to give it to, how it
> would be distributed among POV-team members past and present, etc.)

This matter is internal to the POV-Team so it shouldn't concern us IMO, 
they will find a way to make a simple distribution after programming 
POV-Ray.

> But one thing hasn't been mentioned yet: Say one of us writes a piece of
> commercial software that incorporates POV-Ray as its "rendering engine" (or
> whatever.) If I'm not mistaken, there are legal mechanisms already in place
> whereby the "POV-Ray entity" (corporation, or whatever it is) profits from that
> in some way. So it seems to me that there might be some kind of monetary
> distribution scheme already in place, re: the development team. IF so, I can't
> see how voluntary donations would be much different from that, insofar as how
> the donations might be distributed.
> 
> KW

I've read that one one is to hire 1 or more POV-Team members for 
personalized or modified versions of POV-Ray for comercial or private 
uses, but yeah, that is good but would deviate the POV-Team from their 
main task.

Ironic enough, I have seen donationware that I would ashamed to ask 
money for, also many projects in sourceforge.net are donationware and 
they're rather simple compared to POV-Ray so those and other reasons led 
me to suggest it for POV-Ray.

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