I’d be very interested in having your advice / opinion on the following questions.
In the context of a community driven project where the maintainers/core developers have a steady job unrelated to Open Source development, but take a lot/all of their spare time to contribute to the project, which can be exhausting in the long run, one thing that could help the situation would be if they could get a revenue that would allow them to take a few days off from their regular job every month, in order to make great progress on the project and still actually have some time to actually rest and take care of themselves. If the project is popular enough, it’s relatively easy to open a collective on Open Collective, for example, and get money from donations to pay the maintainers. The point then is how to actually pay them, if they can’t issue an invoice, because the fiscal host will need an official document to justify its payment.
Considering that there is copyright involved in writing software and licencing it (even if the licence is an Open Source one), in France, it is possible for an individual to issue a “note de droits d’auteur” in order to get paid for this ; and when you declare your taxes, you have a category dedicated to this kind of revenue.
So I was wondering if there are equivalents in other countries, especially in Switzerland and Germany.
I’ve never issued a “note de droit d’auteur” for contributed code to a FLOSS project.
Donations I sometimes receive is just “love money”. (Note that you also need to declare donations to the tax authorities, at least in France.)
One problem I see with this idea of issuing a “note de droit d’auteur” is that you have to commit to some tangible deliverable for the note to be valid: otherwise this is just a donation in disguise. I bet many FLOSS contributors would not like such a commitment as it does not fit very well with the way we generally work (at least from my experience.)
Instead of trying to get paid this way while negociating a few days off per week with your employer (which can also be difficult), a more workable solution would be to have your employer receiving the donations directly (as donations, not “note de droit d’auteur”) and then allowing you to work on the FLOSS project they support.
I think the constraint is quite thin, because it is aimed at regular contributors, so it will be easy for them to associate some of the I.P. they generally license for free to this transaction. But do you think that this would be considered irregular by the fiscal administration?
In the context I’m considering, such scenario would be difficult. Both for someone in a job completely unrelated to software dev, and for a student.
I think the constraint is quite thin, because it is aimed at regular contributors, so it will be easy for them to associate some of the I.P. they generally license for free to this transaction. But do you think that this would be considered irregular by the fiscal administration?
I’m not sure. Perhaps this is feasible. I’d be curious to see how, though. Are you basing this hypothesis on some real world constraints?
In the context I’m considering, such scenario would be difficult. Both for someone in a job completely unrelated to software dev, and for a student.
I’m trying to get in touch with Swiss/German lawyers and I’ll keep you posted