You kind of threw this out there. What makes you think this, is it something different about a charitable cause versus say health care? Both are distributing the same resources.
I might agree that decentralized decision making about resources is superior, but even that is full of caveats. I’m not sure why you think independently unorganized citizens are better than a group of citizens whose official capacity is to allocate (ie why call out government as something different? The important piece is centralized/decentralized, not govt vs citizen.)
At least it is supported in the literature - the lag and loss of resolution in reporting back centrally makes decisions a worse fit for actual conditions on the ground.
For an individual, the charity can claim the basic rate tax the individual paid (Gift Aid) and higher rate tax payers can claim the higher rate taxes using their self assessment, so in round numbers, it doesn't really matter who makes the donation.
That being said, it relies on there being a UK charity, which a lot of software foundations are not.
(Aside: I work for a US company that does support US foundations, as well as employ a few CPython core devs)
It's a platform I've created where you can allocate anywhere from 0.1 - 5% of revenue to causes you believe in. Right now it's geared towards charities but I'd love to include open source sponsorship in there too.
Putting on my company hat, and I'm no expert, I believe for this to work in Denmark (where I live), you would need to be able to put some form of goodwill on the balance sheet. Companies still need to pay tax on donations (at a reduced rate up to ~2300€/year for recognized charities).
Unfortunately, 0.5% of the Danish workforce is directly employed by the tax office. It's a serious threat over here.
Did you end up coming up with company sponsorship plans for your makerspace? What kind of perks did you offer your sponsors?
I used to be 100% against tax deductible contributions to not-for-profits. I've turned 180 on this. Citizens are much better at allocating funds to worthy causes than a central government.
In the case of our Makerspace, we couldn't get any public funding because we didn't fit into a predefined category such as a "sports team", and operating a garage full of tools could be seen as competing with private industry. Somehow there was money available for the lawyers who delivered that opinion to the local government though.