> It is an extremely tacky move to assign a value to something you're giving away for free.
Actually in the UK it's an encouraged thing by HMRC.
HMRC would rather see you invoice a company for £5k and then to write it off as a gift, than to not see records at all.
In the case of giving to charities via this method, the government will go so far as to give you a benefit on your declared level of corporate tax as a direct result of giving something to a charity and invoicing in this way.
You might internally consider that to be a marketing activity, or a social/community/sustainability activity, but the government cares not... they strongly want to see benefits and gifts recorded and will (in some cases such as charities, non-profits, etc) will reward you by taking less tax.
That's UK specific of course, but point is: the UK government and tax office don't view it as tacky. And it's a good business incentive to offer such benefits to charities and other specified types of organisation.
We get your point. But there are no open source versions of the services offered there. It's not only "software", it's "service".
Example: Textmaster is a marketplace for copywriting & translating. Do you think that they could offer some "debian authors"? No, because they have to pay them, otherwise it would be slavery.
It is logic assign a value to the service that is offered. Tens or hundreds of thousands of businesses pay for these services. What they are paying is the value.
When you issue a coupon to offer free access to a service, you don't write it off as a marketing expense... At least, this is not what we're doing at Mailjet. And I don't think it's possible for anyone to do this, it would make things a bit too easy ^^
Imagine: "Hey friend, here's a coupon for 1000 billion emails, it doesn't matter if you don't use it, just activate the coupon so I can write the value off, this way, there won't be any benefits this year."
O wait, maybe that's $1000k worth of tools. Or is it $10000k?
(Maybe they should describe what the tools does and not do a "less-than-useful" money comparison)