The wage slaves.
IANAL
Obviously a lot more of the details would need to be worked out to try and minimize how much companies try and game that to simply fund their own research tax-free, but I wonder if the type of behavior you're looking for could be economically incentivized given the right corporate tax legal reforms.
Google gifted schools Chromebooks, which seems like an incredible act of charity. Except for the fact that you have to pay a subscription to Google to use them. Which means they really just managed to get a tax write-off while picking up more customers.
How do you ensure a company is doing something in the best interests of society or the charity or organization they are donating to, rather than in the best interests of themselves?
Generally speaking, it's pretty difficult to tell if charities are actually being charitable, and there is no way to ensure it -- we can't mark each dollar's fall. But we do have laws that cover those sort of 'hidden catch' scenario; you can't trick people into a financial obligation. Is there some other loophole that you can identify?
And of course, as my source demonstrated, there is definitely a license cost to use Chromebooks in a managed environment, and it is not free for educators.
As the situation is _right now_, the law is probably fine, but I'd be against the parent's suggestion of allowing a loophole for them to get to repatriate cash tax-free for this sort of usage, because it's likely just going to work out in their favor, and not in ours or the public interest.
Do you happen to have a reference for this? G suite for education is free as far as I know and I wasn't able to find anything else that you might be referring to.
You can see an educational portal listing the cost of the management license at $30 here, which isn't really a complete picture, but demonstrates that we aren't talking about something they give schools for free: https://edu.google.com/products/devices/
Note that this is kinda of well-hidden, but that last link cites the "total cost of ownership" of a $149 Chromebook over three years as $588, which should give you an idea the difference between the hardware they give away, and the eventual cost of everything you need to deploy the suckers.
Schools is definitely big money for Google, it's just well-disguised as an altruistic endeavor.
You need to show that those licenses were not included in the gift. And let's just assume that they're not that stupid.
> Note that this is kinda of well-hidden, but that last link cites the "total cost of ownership" of a $149 Chromebook over three years as $588, which should give you an idea the difference between the hardware they give away, and the eventual cost of everything you need to deploy the suckers.
For a budget windows laptop or tablet the hardware cost would be higher and the support cost unlikely to be lesser.
> Schools is definitely big money for Google
Schools are a tiny segment for Google that would not hurt them in the slightest to lose. The margins on low-end hardware are not exactly the stuff dreams are made of, and they really are making peanuts on ChromeOS. We can and should contrast this to Microsoft, who has been playing the "loss leader" pricing game in educational circles for far longer with far more success.
From a quick search, it looks like the IRS does sometimes allow businesses to make deductible contributions to a 501(c)3, but that it first attempts to determine if the business expects to receive a "substantial return benefit". [0]
The IRS seems to already have specific rules around "qualified sponsorship payments". [1]
[0] https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/tools-resources/corporat...
[1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p598/ch03.html#en_US_201701...
Here's the thing, in corporate devs are as essential as people toghtening nuts in a factory.
The value one produces there is multiplyed by the internal know how, customer base, marketing reach and tight focus management, none of which it's brough by the developer.
That value is stripped from developer work just to be pocketed by management and sales is a myth, besides, if it werent there'd be plenty developers going solo and the median salary would be in the millions.
Edit: and lo and behold, instant downvote. No wonders the tech community is so blind and guillible when it comes to the value argument, from the extraction myth to the stock options gambling.
Some developers are just writing code to satisfy a spec and really could be replaced by any other developer; others are uniquely valuable and significantly increase their employers value, without necessarily being recognised for it.
Good software acts as a multiplier, so it's not equivalent to tightening bolts. It's more equivalent to finding optimisations that reduce the number of bolts which need to be tightened. A relatively small amount of software can drastically increase the value of a company/process
It's true that an individual can't do the same things a company can do. That's not some profound assertion. It's however impossible to go from that and assert that is because they are incapable of doing those things even if they had the funding to do so. That is to say that the marketing issue is more or less an issue of funding or money. That is what keeps that individual devs from capturing more value that is instead captured by companies or by managers, marketers, etc. As well as hiring additional people to form an actual company that performs the functions of a company. However a significant number of founders are developers, many of them including Paul Gahram and Mark Zuckerberg average developers that went to found multi-million to billion dollar companies because of funding. Now after the fact maybe you can argue that there was something special about them, but that's a post-facto assertion. They were average devs and if they had not gotten the funding would be relegated to your nut bolt tighteners not having been able to express their "true" potential.