🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <GUMBY.90Apr29165320@Cygnus.COM> gumby@Cygnus.COM (David Vinayak Wallace) writes:
>I find this refreshing and reassuring.  I am glad that there are still
>American companies which plan for the long term and realize how much
>better off they are with full source distribution and true open
>computing.
----

	Perhaps with well funded large companies, this may be true, but
I am curious.  What are the tax ramifications of developing software
that is given away?  

	Let's suppose you want to start a small business.  You develop
buy a computer and write it off as a business expense.  However, you
spend let's say, half of your computer time developing GNU type
software.  It seems the IRS might then come back and disallow
at least half if not all of the deductions because your GNU side
of the business qualified more as a hobby, not as a business.  If
you are lucky, they might let you off with claiming you were making
a donation to a non-profit organization (assuming GNU has that legal
status), but then that is subject to the 2% exclusionary rule.

	Of course the other part of this is denying someone just 
compensation for his work just because he has linked with g++ libraries
or _even_ used a subroutine of GNU source code.  If someone developed
an application that was 20K lines long, and linked it with 450 lines of
GNU source code, is it equitable for him to get nothing for his work?
To say yes would be like denying an author (or writer) compensation
for a book he had written because he quoted a public domain text
on page 37.  That does not seem right.

	Do you think such a writer will be able to afford his next meal
or otherwise be able to afford to write anything in the future?  To
deny him the right to earn a living seems rather harsh.  BTW, the 450
lines represents the approximate length of the bison parser text
that is included with a user source program -- I am only estimating
from the code included by yacc.  The 20K lines could be from an
interpreter or editor that the user has developed.

-wat-
--
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