Last week I went to a seminar about tax concessions for not-for-profits. One of the things I found out/had confirmed was that there is no legal definition of “charity” or what causes etc can be described as “charitable”. Well — kind of. Like the UK Australia relies on centuries-old law, solidified a bit with some case law (courts’ decisions). The government did attempt to define “charity” and “charitable” with the Charities Bill 2003, but it all got a bit too hard and didn’t end up going anywhere. Nonetheless, some types of organisations have benefited from the government deciding to explicitly set them as “charitable”, perhaps rather than waiting for case law to go the right way.
Thus there was the Extension of Charitable Purpose Bill 2004:
The statutory extension allows:
• organisations providing child care to the public on a non-profit basis;
• self-help bodies with open and non-discriminatory membership; and
• closed or contemplative religious orders that offer prayerful intervention to the public,
to be treated as charities for the purposes of all Commonwealth legislation.
So now you can be a charity based on law from the 1600s, case law, or a specific statutory extension. Good-o.
This got me thinking: what if developing free software was declared a charitable purpose? After all, it benefits society, in a somewhat indirect way: better quality code, more extensible and adaptable code (papering over the failings of the market), greater software user freedom and control, greater technology awareness amongst more of the population, and it encourages innovation and empowers all sectors by removing/lowering price barriers to software.
On the other hand, unlike childcare, it often runs on the smell of an oily rag, so the argument for the need is a bit weak. And it’s not too sexy; we’re not talking about The Family after all, just some random geeks. (Right…?) Also, the proprietary software business sector would probably doubt cry foul at a kind of “competitive advantage” for free software folk. (Although there are commercial childcare operators — or at least there used to be — commercial software has done a much better job of marketing themselves as the Right Way to develop software.)
Having DGR status (tax-deductible donations) would be nice, though.
