On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 7:44 PM, Patrik D'haeseleer <patrikd@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 11:32 AM, robb <sf99er@gmail.com> wrote:

i'm still confused a bit how a for-profit startup's office space rental is a tax exempt donation

Not sure I understood that. Is someone trying to rent office space, and claiming that as a donation?

If someone is paying for a Sudo membership, keep in mind that memberships do NOT count as tax deductible donations, because you do get something in return!

Whether someone is actually renting an office or paying for a Sudo membership to have a de facto office, those things would presumably fall under business expenses for them - same as if they counted their home office as a business expense.

A few folk are spending a bunch of time in sudo working on their for-profit IoT startup. I can't remember if it's fully open source / open hardware. If it's not and they use the space a lot then maybe it's something we should bring up at the next meeting on June 14th.

Or we could have the discussion right in this thread. How do people feel about that?

If it's open stuff they're working on and they spend many hours a week at sudo then yeah that seems to me to go against the spirit of the space and I feel like we should probably tell them to find a real co-working space instead of being a bunch of cheapskates.

Does anyone know? How open is this stuff? If it's 100% open hardware/software but still a top-down controlled for profit how do people feel about it? What if it's 100% closed?

marc/juul