Hacker News Reader

Comment by ufmace | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of one of patio11's posts somewhere. I don't remember which one, but the gist is that big companies basically can't donate to tipjars, patreons, etc. But if you make it a product with an enterprise option for support or something, they'll gladly pay tens of thousands a month.

View on HN

Yes, exactly!

I face this with my government clients. They spend very little time thinking of the actual amount (even if it's $30k), and more time about "how are we going to purchase this??"

Tip Jars aren't an effective way to get money for this stuff, at least if you want money from companies. It's good for "aw this library helped me, let me throw in $5" from individuals.

Tip jars and pay what you can are effective. Bs corporate red tape is the problem

BS corporate red tape is a reality, though. So why not offer workarounds that help them give you money?

As mentioned above, offer consulting services and accept corporate purchase orders. Be able to give and receive PO numbers. This is the language the bean counters speak, and sprinkles magic pixie dust on your invoices, ensuring you get paid.

One really big downside to offering this yourself or providing it as a service: contracts. You can try avoid paying a lawyer and use a standard contract. The engineering manager would be cool with that since he just wants to support a project but all bets are off when it hits legal. A big enough company and you can get into a seemingly endless revision back-and-forth that can last weeks. No big deal for them and other big companies they work with since they have salaried lawyers on staff but the cost is something to consider for everyone else.

Hiring a lawyer is important if you are going to be contracting with a large enough company though. The money you save and the time you spend as a result of having a competent lawyer draft, negotiate, and proof your contracts pays for itself in the long run when, inevitably, something goes wrong on a project.

The red tape is needed for legal reasons. As a company you can't just throw around money via Paypal, gofundme or whatever, the risk is too high that it will end up being a tax/audit problem.

Give a company a proper bill with VAT, and they'll stuff you with money.

Companies make charitable donations. I wonder if there's a charity that accepts donations for specific projects. If not, is there a good reason why?

Companies make charitable donations to entities registered with the tax authorities as charities. When a donation is scrutinised during an audit its clear what its for, based on the receiving entity. A random payment to a person looks like a bribe or some suspicious activity when its not in direct exchange for goods or services. This will require an explanation to the person conducting the audit at the very least.

Are they? Usually unless you're known, they bring in next to nothing.

What makes it BS? Can you come up with a better way to manage giving access to a bank account with hundreds of millions of dollars to a thousand people?

If they don’t accomplish the goal (and they don’t), you can hardly call them “effective”.

Same thing. I could get a sign-off to order a licence worth $500 or a 20$/month subscription if it's needed, but a donation of 5$ would be absolutely impossible; not just hard, but legally unacceptable use of funds.

in germany you can just use an receipt for stuff under a certain amount. no need for a special invoice, etc. the receipt only needs the total amount, the date, effort or product name, vat percentage. well of course for a donation you need a document that you actually correctly donated, etc..

This is the almighty power manifest of the purchase order in corporate finance.

Only true in a fairly narrow sense. At my company we use a ton of open source software. We have support contracts for a few of the big-ticket/core pieces, but I doubt anyone would even think to bother to pay for support for the vast majority of OSS we use.

The other option is being a 501c3/6 foundation whose purpose is to support the particular software project, and then companies will donate to said foundation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com