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No donating in Finland

Finnish laws regulating donations and collecting money for charity make it hard for many modern ways of earning or making good nearly impossible.

Only non-profits can collect money without giving anything back. In the light of this law it is against the law to accept donations for example working on an open source project. The model that is highly popular among the open source community around the world. But here in Finland you would need to actually give something concrete back for those "donations". And obviously you'd be taxed appropriately. 

These regulations also make it hard to "sell" more abstract and indirect things like emission compensations. Companies selling these compensations have faced troubles when they have been deemed collecting money instead of selling something. And obviously they can't do that without a proper permit. Which can only be issued to non-profit organizations. So you can't buy a planting of a tree from these companies. They need to convert into non-profit organizations accepting donations and using those donations to plant those trees.

The office granting these permits is the same handling gambling and lottery. Maybe there is a business opportunity founding a gambling company that collects money and randomly plants trees where customers then might or might not get some specific tree as a reward if they are lucky. 

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