Re: GNU/Linux taxed in Poland ?! (fwd)
On Monday 13 November 2000 23:54, Craig Sanders wrote:
> sure it does. the monetary cost of the license is zero dollars, which is
> clearly included in the price you paid for the CD.
And this is a problem. Zero dollars as a cost of any license are not
acceptable by tax offices.
> fair enough. but you need to challenge their use of MS software
> as a reference price. you can do that in at least two ways: a)
> by establishing that gnu/linux is an entirely different type of
> software, with vastly different functionality to MS software; and b) by
> establishing that gnu/linux software already has a known market price
> - either use the $2 price of a CD, or the retail price of any of the
> commercial distributions or the retail price of a BSD CD-set.
Unfortunately the tax office has already used M$ shareware as reference
prices but in a wrong direction. They assumed Linux costs the same like M$
shareware costs and now they asked for money from "donation".
> the tax office's argument is that tax is payable because you are getting
> something which normally costs $xxx as a gift. you need to prove (and
> get them to understand) that it normally costs nothing, that it is free
> to use and copy for anyone in the world.
The current Polish tax regulations included in tons of books do not cover any
term of free license for software. Guys in tax offices do not read any other
books during theirs work.
> finally, the tax office affects all computer users in poland not just
> linux users. people download and use free software for all operating
> systems, not just linux - start a publicity campaign against the
> tax office for trying to tax free stuff downloaded from the net.
I agree completely. It was reason I posted my first mail about it.
> remember, they are a slow government bureacracy (and thus working in a
> technological dark age). you should be able to run rings about them in
> any publicity war.
I have already known several people outside of debian mailing lists (and from
different countries in Europe) are going to raise a publicity war. But to be
honest it was not my intention.
>
> craig
>
> --
> craig sanders
Mariusz
--
Mariusz Przygodzki | Good judgement comes from experience.
dune@home.pl | Experience comes from bad judgement.
http://www.dune.home.pl |
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