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by TaylorAlexander 1985 days ago
Strange thing: Open Collective's offers fiscal hosts for simplifying paperwork, but if you select the Open Source Collective as your fiscal host, donations are not tax deductible because they say "the IRS doesn't consider software development a charitable act" or something. But there's so many software non profits in the US and I really don't understand that claim.

So Open Collective has another fiscal host for charities and those donations are tax deductible, and I'm now trying to figure out what the difference really is as I'd like to set up my own charitable organization to fund a farming robot I am developing.

Anyway I could almost just say Libjpeg-turbo could set up an opencollective as their whole mission is to solve the paperwork problem for open source projects, but for whatever reason their open source software donations aren't actually tax deductible...

Does anyone here know about this IRS issue?

1 comments

IRS doesn't consider software development a charitable act

This is correct AFAIK and Mozilla ran into the same thing years ago. Educational charities can be tax-exempt so you have to have an educational mission and develop software on the side. https://blogs.gnome.org/jnelson/2014/06/30/the-new-501c3-and...

Fantastic link thank you, I am reading it now!