Duane Morris facing a partner pay suit, a DOJ grand jury on Obama-era intel, Nunes’ defamation loss, judicial AI errors, and my column on open-source tax law
Sorry to hear that you were under the weather Monday. I was wondering what happened to my daily dose of minimum competence. Glad you are back, and feeling better.
The Bloomberg article on classifying OSS projects as non-profit, really struct a chord, since I spent many years helping to drive an OSPO (IANAL, but worked closely with Legal team managing policies, tools, enforcement of license requirements, etc). Often frustrated by how hard it is to get funding/support for key OSS projects; requisite xkcd software dep pic: https://xkcd.com/2347 .
The rejection of the request for non-profit status of a completely standalone OSS project baffles me. Curious -- what is the difference between that case, and the likes of Linux Foundation, Apache, and Mozilla, etal, non-profits which support multiple OSS projects? Is it the structure of the organization/OSS project?
I agree, in general, that OSS projects should be considered non-profit; however, there is a bit of gray area with companies that package OSS from several different open source projects and sell support services, like Canonical (Ubuntu), RedHat, and other common Linux OSes, (and as you mention, databases, and web frameworks), that are used for quite a bit of today's infrastructure. I guess this is similar to your "Revenue Ruling 86-49" example?
It is also common to see for-profit companies that publish software under OSS licenses - those companies wouldn't be tax exempt. So I presume "OSS project" would be a project completely independent of a for-profit company. Then again, I have no clue how OpenAI is still considered a non-profit.
It is becoming less common to see purely standalone OSS projects that are complete apps/tools/libraries that are broadly used enough to be under a foundation umbrella (e.g. python, or openssl) ; or already under a commercial company for hosting/visibility (e.g. npm, go registry, dockerhub).
What are your thoughts on something like the Sovereign Tech Fund (https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund)? Is that a better model than the broad US-based OSS foundations that exist?
I think the difference, at least in the IRS' eyes, between the Linux Foundation etc. and the taxpayer noted was that in the former they're overseeing a project and in the latter they're actually developing the project in-house. The test they then went to was whether it was conceivable the software created could be used by a for-profit enterprise. I like the STF idea a lot and argued for something similar, a tax-backed sovereign wealth fund for AI profits: https://news.bloombergtax.com/tax-insights-and-commentary/alaska-is-a-model-for-taxing-ai-as-an-extracted-natural-resource
Sorry to hear that you were under the weather Monday. I was wondering what happened to my daily dose of minimum competence. Glad you are back, and feeling better.
The Bloomberg article on classifying OSS projects as non-profit, really struct a chord, since I spent many years helping to drive an OSPO (IANAL, but worked closely with Legal team managing policies, tools, enforcement of license requirements, etc). Often frustrated by how hard it is to get funding/support for key OSS projects; requisite xkcd software dep pic: https://xkcd.com/2347 .
The rejection of the request for non-profit status of a completely standalone OSS project baffles me. Curious -- what is the difference between that case, and the likes of Linux Foundation, Apache, and Mozilla, etal, non-profits which support multiple OSS projects? Is it the structure of the organization/OSS project?
I agree, in general, that OSS projects should be considered non-profit; however, there is a bit of gray area with companies that package OSS from several different open source projects and sell support services, like Canonical (Ubuntu), RedHat, and other common Linux OSes, (and as you mention, databases, and web frameworks), that are used for quite a bit of today's infrastructure. I guess this is similar to your "Revenue Ruling 86-49" example?
It is also common to see for-profit companies that publish software under OSS licenses - those companies wouldn't be tax exempt. So I presume "OSS project" would be a project completely independent of a for-profit company. Then again, I have no clue how OpenAI is still considered a non-profit.
It is becoming less common to see purely standalone OSS projects that are complete apps/tools/libraries that are broadly used enough to be under a foundation umbrella (e.g. python, or openssl) ; or already under a commercial company for hosting/visibility (e.g. npm, go registry, dockerhub).
What are your thoughts on something like the Sovereign Tech Fund (https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund)? Is that a better model than the broad US-based OSS foundations that exist?
I think the difference, at least in the IRS' eyes, between the Linux Foundation etc. and the taxpayer noted was that in the former they're overseeing a project and in the latter they're actually developing the project in-house. The test they then went to was whether it was conceivable the software created could be used by a for-profit enterprise. I like the STF idea a lot and argued for something similar, a tax-backed sovereign wealth fund for AI profits: https://news.bloombergtax.com/tax-insights-and-commentary/alaska-is-a-model-for-taxing-ai-as-an-extracted-natural-resource