Ancestors

Toot

Written by Paul Barker on 2025-01-07 at 10:57

I have a question for any other UK folks who run small businesses, please boost for visibility:

Do you donate to open source projects? If so, how do you make these donations?

My goal for this year is to donate 1% of the business revenue, split between social/environmental charities and the vital open source projects which we rely on.

My understanding is that, in the UK context, donations to charities and non-profit organisations can only be claimed as business expenses if the recipient is registered as charitable organisation in the UK. That would exclude us from claiming pure donations (where we receive nothing in exchange for the donation) to most open source foundations as business expenses as they're registered in the USA or Europe.

Many open source foundations offer "memberships" at different tiers for businesses but these are all well outside of our budget as a two person micro business.

Donating as a non business expense would need to be done after tax which would reduce the amount we can donate.

Am I missing something?

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Descendants

Written by Paul Barker on 2025-01-07 at 12:46

Some follow up points:

I am planning to discuss this with our accountants, but they're not likely to be familiar with the specifics of how and why a business would donate to open source projects, so having some input from others would be very useful.

And if there are barriers to making tax efficient donations from UK businesses to open source projects/organisations, then that's something we should be talking about as a community and industry so that we can get it fixed.

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Written by cuan_knaggs on 2025-01-07 at 12:34

@pbarker pinging @neil

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Written by Bruno Girin on 2025-01-07 at 12:38

@pbarker not the question you asked but can I introduce you to a UK charity that does good stuff in tech? https://codebar.io/

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Written by Paul Barker on 2025-01-07 at 12:39

@brunogirin yes, suggestions of appropriate UK based charities or open source organisations is welcome!

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Written by Andreas Gohr on 2025-01-07 at 12:42

@pbarker what if you ask for an invoice? Let them make it out for "XYZ support". "Buying" support should be a business expense and you don't need to tell your tax office that it was you who supported XYZ and not the other way round ;-)

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Written by Matthew Skelton on 2025-01-07 at 12:47

@pbarker treat donations to non-UK orgs as sponsorship - then you get something in return (logo on a webpage).

?

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Written by Paul Barker on 2025-01-07 at 13:36

@matthewskelton That might work with some smaller projects but most organisations expect an amount that is outside our budget for recognition as a sponsor.

E.g. SFC only lists companies that "have donated substantially in the past twelve months" and the smallest recognized sponsorship tier for Outreachy is $10,000 per year.

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Written by Richard Loxley on 2025-01-07 at 13:39

@pbarker I don’t donate to generic projects (e.g. libraries), but if I use an open source product, and they have a suggested donation in lieu of a licensing price, then I usually pay that as a business expense. Although I’ve not checked with my accountant if that should be logged in a different way to a purchase - in my head it just counted as a software purchase.

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Written by Simon Wolf on 2025-01-07 at 13:58

@pbarker I don’t think you are unfortunately. It would be great to have a registered charity that could disseminate funds to the sorts of things you (and I) want to support via our businesses but I’m not sure of the legality, viability or sustainability of something that would need to be per-country (I assume).

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Written by Emelia 👸🏻 on 2025-01-07 at 14:00

@pbarker does UK tax law allow for "gifts" from businesses? e.g., in Germany we have low value (<100€) and high-value gifts

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Written by DamonHD on 2025-01-07 at 14:10

@pbarker I donate to eg Homebrew via Patreon, but don't bother doing it via my company as I don't think it would be worth the paperwork to justify.

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Written by maswan on 2025-01-07 at 16:30

@pbarker A small idea, buy Debian LTS services from @freexian - that's a service sold and not a charity donation, but it ends up with money going to developers making free software better.

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