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by jahewson 1985 days ago
Not really. Tax-exempt status in the US prohibits donated money being earmarked. It also can’t be used to funnel money to arbitrary affiliates - they’d need to satisfy the permissible tax-free mission of the org. Plus those affiliates are going to end up paying the tax themselves. Without a clear picture of where the money is intended to go, it’s unlikely such an org could obtain tax-exempt status in the first place.

Note: tax-exempt status has become harder to obtain in recent years for open source projects.

1 comments

> Tax-exempt status in the US prohibits donated money being earmarked.

Is that true? According to for example [0], a donation earmarked for a particular individual is not tax-deductible, but a donation earmarked for a particular purpose can be. I think a donation earmarked to an open source project sounds more like the second than the first – they are free to give the money to any developer they wish, so long as that developer is going to use that money to work on the earmarked project.

[0] https://charitylawyerblog.com/2015/07/02/donations-benefitin...