On May 28, 2012, at 1:46 PM, Hannes Kuhnert wrote: > Tim McNamara schrieb: >> Sending money directly to developers instead of to a central Lilypond >> account cuts a lot of costs and eliminates much of the need for >> organizational bureaucracy (e.g., an accounting department). > > On the other hand donations to a non-profit organisation would give the > contributor a benefit on income tax (think as higher donations at same > effort).
That's not a bad point an there is some truth to that, but I don't feel the need to get a tax break in order to feel that my donation to Lilypond has value to me. Lilypond already has intrinsic value to me- I have dozens of clean, readable lead sheets done for my jazz combo (which takes me about 20-30 minutes to have a lead sheet typeset for concert, Eb and Bb instruments). I've tried/seen some others- my trumpeter's Finale lead sheets are hard to read, MuseScore sheets tend to look a little awkward and take me longer to do, etc. Lilypond's output is superior IMHO. So on those grounds it is worth paying some money whether I get a tax break or not. It is one of the two contributions I can make- I can't write application code, but I can use the software and offer feedback and suggestions from userland and I can donate money. I think the most sustainable approach is to get a lot of conscientious Lilypond users to commit to donating a fairly small amount. There are thousands of us, after all. 500 of us donating €10 a month ought to make this work. If someone set up a non-profit to collect and distribute contributions to Lilypond, a goodly percentage of those contributions would necessarily go to run the non-profit: legal fees, registration fees, accounting costs, etc. Paying developers directly sidesteps that stuff. There is the perception of that being a less accountable approach and I think that some may be uncomfortable with that- it took me a little thinking to get over it. _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
