[FFmpeg-devel] Sponsoring and generating money in general (IRC meeting follow-up)

[Robert Krüger]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Kieran Kunhya <kierank at obe.tv> wrote:
>> I was hoping that using a platform like bountysource would help here
>> but I haven't really done any research yet, what the actual legal
>> situation is. I contacted them to find out.
>
> I handled the finances for the VLC project's kickstarter last year.
> All the crowdsourcing platforms avoid making a call on VAT.
> I played it safe and treated the crowdsourced funding as a "sale" and
> paid the VAT. The cross border stuff was also rather complex.

Good to know. It would certainly help to collect this knowledge, if it
is gathered with time and maybe add some stuff like "Experience with
donations from country X: ..." to a respective page on the website.

That is a perfect example of a successful OSS crowdfunding campaign
btw.. I'm not finished with my research but an interesting fact I came
across is, that for the pledged amount to be fully tax-deductible as
company expenditures for a company, it needs to receive something in
return (like in your case being linked to or mentioned on the website
which can be seen as marketing expenditures), at least I found a
source that claims that to be the case for Germany and Austria.
Something that should be kept in mind when setting up such a campaign.
However, in that case you had VLC as a legal entity and in the ffmpeg
case, I guess legally a single developer cannot "sell" being mentioned
on the ffmpeg website in a crowd funding campaign.