Is there a way for non-Europeans to recover the VAT charge on MOS 2.0?

kgrach mentioned something about it being a matter of filling out forms in a now-locked thread. Doing some web searching it seems that this only applies to when you physically go to Europe and you do it at customs before leaving Europe. I don't see any listings about this situation, where VAT is simply not supposed to be charged in the first place. I'd have no problem if the $35 was going to the MOS team. But its not, and I see no reason to gift $35USD to the German goverment for an EU tax that I'm not supposed to pay.

@ kgrach or anyone else who might know, where do I get the proper forms, where do I send them to, etc?

[ Edited by fairlanefastback on 2008/7/8 12:31 ]

I thought about that too. AFAIK some internet shops exclude VAT if you are outside EU. I could be wrong, but something tells me that I'm not...

@fairlanefastback

That taxes help to build roads so MorphOS Team can drive their cars and they deserve driving their BMWs at full speed, don't they?

Interesting, I didn't notice that VAT was being charged. Typically as a courtesy the merchant does not charge VAT if the billing address is not in the EEC. Otherwise you need to a VAT reclaim form. If you travel in the EU, there are always VAT Recovery offices at the airport. You stop in there on your way home with all your receipts and they give you the VAT money back..

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Right but how do you recover VAT from an online merchant where VAT is not due but was charged? I don't even know where to begin beyond the google search I did, which didn't help.

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They must have really good day jobs if they own BMWs! No way MOS sales could let them afford them!

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Official MorphOS Team car is Porsche - to be in MorphOS Team you must have atleast two of them.

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Word on the street is you guys secretly funded this purchase for the Polish giovernment as well since you are all so rich:

http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?storyID=123031592

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If official car of the MorphOS Team is Porsche, then they earned nothing...

it would be more appealing if we could recover VAT.

@fairlanefastback

If you compare deutschland's salaries with the rest of european countries you'll see it's easier to buy more expensive items like MorphOS or BMWs

E.g. a dinner in a good italian restaurant costs the same (and in some cases much less) than in Spain. Supermarket products costs more or less the same as in Spain. Renting a flat costs the same (or less)... and a long "et cetera"...

You can bet they have good jobs as a lot of MOS development takes places there

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You are putting MorphOS and a BMW in the same category of expensiveness? Thats crazy.

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Its my understanding a lot occurs in Poland too which has a 12.8% unemployment rate. Your Spain only has an 8.3% rate, which is better than even Germany at 8.4%. You have mentioned on this board that you travel a lot and keep Morphos capable machines at multiple locations. You don't seem to be in a position to be crying poor as much as you have been if you can afford these multiple machines and multiple places to constantly keep them, let alone having money for travel expenditures.

@ fairlanefastback

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Unemployment rates are fairly meaningless if your intent is to compare the economic situations of people living in different countries. There are unemployed people in, say, Sweden who live a better life than people in another country who need to work three jobs, have no health insurance and can barely pay rent and food.

Plus, not all countries measure unemployment the same way. There can be rather big differences the way it is measured, in fact.

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The point here is that Crumb has asserted from very arbitrary information that all the MOS developers are economically better off than him by a great margin, driving fancy cars and definately having good high paying jobs (by the mere fact that some are residents of Germany). He does this by saying Germans make more on average than Spainards yet only have to pay the same amount for pizza (and other similarly bizarre thought processes).

I was trying to make a point of irony back that its easy to say ridicuolously arbitrary things in return. The bottom line is he dosen't know the personal economic situation of each and every MOS developer, for all we know some are on the lower econiomic scale for their country, who knows! Yet he is throwing around the fiction in his own head as if it were definitive fact to paint the MOS developers as evil rich jerks out to be mean to us. He actually has in one thread described them as laughing at us.

In my book you don't make up stuff about people with no proof.

[ Edited by fairlanefastback on 2008/7/9 15:11 ]

@fairlanefastback

And you are not in position to determine my status or to decide what I can or cannot buy. I'll decide if I travel or not, thank you.It would be nice if you didn't mix conversations from different forums. Thank you in advance

FYI traveling to Zaragoza from Madrid is actually quite cheap: 12Euros. Train costs 4 times more. Train is overpriced and expensive. Now try to convince me that train is wonderful with your MOS-price-is-great arguments.

If you quote, please do it properly. My complete phrase was "You can bet they have good jobs as a lot of MOS development takes places there " and the simple meaning is that a lot of development takes place at MOSTeam real life jobs. English is your native language and it isn't mine (look at my spelling mistakes, I wrote "places" instead of "place") but I think the phrase is not so hard to understand

I have complained about MorphOS being expensive and that's all. And MorphOS price could look semi-reasonable to a German or American like you but it doesn't look so affordable to most of other countries.

You don't seem to understand very well my comparisons... and using unemployment rate as a comparison of countries salaries is laughable.

I could also pay 150Euros for a bottle of a delicious coke and the coke producer surely would deserve a lot of love and money but sorry, it's still overpriced.

I could also try to follow the fashion of buyying a flat and pay interests until I die. I could, but I won't do that.

You could sell me a mouse for 150Euros but sorry, a top-of-the-line one costs half of that.

I could put lots of examples...

If you have read my posts and think that in any place I suggest the MOS developers are getting rich selling MOS licenses it's clear to me that you don't understand me...

Do you think that even if I were given I license I would still agree with the price? Or that if I bought it I would change my mood and say "oh well... the price is OK".

I want to see MorphOS succeed. I have promoted MorphOS (and still I do, despiting what you think), translated and done conferences. And I have stayed from almost 20 years without stopping supporting and promoting Amiga/MOS and helping users.

Now, I have the chance to make one conference at the end of this month in a party that will have 4000 people so it will have a good exposure (even if just a 1% of these people came), but I'll probably decline the offer if the MorphOS team raises the price to 150Euros.

How can I justify that stupid price? And the "license locked to one machine" idea? The piracy argument could be understood but then why put a price so high?... if you sum the protection to the price people will simply leave the conference as soon as I say that it costs 150Euros.

If they locked the price in 111Euros not much people will buy it but the quantity doesn't produce so much fear.

I don't think you understand my frustration... we have a cheap machine and although it's slow and underpowered (USB1 and IDE suck for example) it would be great as an introduction to MorphOS... and now MorphOS Team (well, the ones who set the prices) has signed the capital punishment to MorphOS.


BTW, I'm getting tired of replying you as you seem to read everything without putting some attention and you try to justify the price of a product with moralities "they deserve it" (I also deserve the money I earn and I don't deserve having to pay twice as normal), with classism "you are poor, live with it", later with "you live in a richer country than germany" and after all that blahblahblah about customer sacrifice for a wonderful product like MorphOS you complain about taxes (ah! the irony!) You could also complain about paypal taxes My complain is simple: MorphOS is too expensive to justify its cost, not just for die-hard fans but to expand the user base. You follow with arguments like "they don't want to get rich and the number of users is not as important".

And in addition to that I add that in some countries the price will cause that the user base decreases in an important way. I could be in a worse economic situation of course, but it's you the one who has desire or interest of me showing "how poor" I am. I'm not poor and I'm not rich, but MorphOS is overpriced and you can't justify its cost.

@fairlanefastback

I really think everyone should just drop this "price" discussion at this point. A price has been set, if you like it fine, if you don't then nobody is forcing you to participate.

A lot of more or less valid points and opinions has been forwarded to the MorphOS team regarding this (I have publicly shared my own opinion on this previously as well), and I'm sure they have read it all. I will buy MorphOS 2.0 in the end myself. I paid similar money for Win XP OEM, and while WinXP is far more usable, I like MorphOS way more, and feels that it's worth supporting a thousand times more than Windows. But just right now I'm in a tough financial position, with lots of expenses for my newly built house and family, and being unemployed on top of that. However, I *will* buy MorphOS 2.0. I spent more than tripple that sum on MorphOS bounties, and far, far more on Pegasos and Efika hardware already. I'm into this platform!

You buy the product if you accept the conditions. If you don't, then you don't.

The price discussion was interesting in the beginning, and something bound to happen. It had to occur, and now I think perhaps everything has been said that needs to be said about it? Continuing discussing this price issue beyond this point is kind of pointless IMHO. And after a certain point in time it becomes nothing but whining. And beyond *that* it becomes trolling. Especially if conducted cross forum/cross site. Nothing worth encouraging IMHO. Let's all just drop it!

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LOL! Should I now complain that you copied this coke idea from someone on AW.net since you say:

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As for that sentiment I see no reason for this to be an issue when the same topic is being discussed. If you are standing behind something you said on a topic you should stand behind it regardless. It being off-limits to quote is silly.

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There are plenty of Americans who can not afford this. Especially given the tremendous weakness of our currency at present. There are also plenty of Germans who can not afford it. You keep throwing out generalizations ("an American like you" - German MOS developers driving around in their ritzy BMWs). The point is that the MOS team it appears felt that the *average* user who can afford a Peg or an Efika, no matter where they live could likely afford MOS 2.0 if they wanted to since there was the hurdle of affording the hardware in the first place, hardware with hardly any other use.

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With sincerley all due respect for your prior efforts, in the here and now, you have a strange way of wanting it to succeed by talking about the developers laughing at people. And developers needing VAT to be charged to have nice smooth roads for their expensive BMWs. Thats not going to endear them to anyone if people take what you spew about them these days at face value.

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No irony, it dosen't go in their pockets. I already told them if it was going in their pockets I'd rather they keep it and have a few drinks on me. They verified it dosen't go to them. There is no irony in me wanting my money to go back to me when its not the right of the German government to have it.

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The developers don't owe you to make this product. Why are you so ok with them going into debt (or at least be "in the red") over making it? You want the cost justifcation to be solely based on what it can do as an OS. You don't want to include what it cost them to make it or to continue making it into the future. You are severly ungrateful to their efforts and the money that they had to spend in those efforts. Why should they even bother if people aren't going to even stay sensitive to the money and time it cost them? Are they your fellow Amigans where we are all in this together, or are they just some business that you see no human factor in?

There is no point in further discussing this topic with you I'm afraid. Its clear we are not going to agree. So we'll have to agree to disagree.


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For the record, and I've mentioned it before I think if they really want the OS to grow more a lower price would likely have been more benefitial. *But* at the same time we need to move beyond the discontinued Efika. And they need money for test hardware to do that. If we don't give it to them then the OS will die anyway. They pondered the question of price and made the best decision as far as they see it.

[ Edited by fairlanefastback on 2008/7/9 16:09 ]

[ Edited by fairlanefastback on 2008/7/9 16:12 ]

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Fine by me!

When I was in Germany alot of places didn't want to deal with V.A.T. forms. Atleast Walmart would take them without a fuss. The thing about the United Kingdom is we can use the forms here, but still have to pay road tax and T.V. tax and other kinds of taxes. With the dollar so low, something like $1=.62 Euro cent or .50 Pence, seems like the U.S. is becoming a third world country. It would be cool to get a discount, sometime like the one laptop per child, but more like "One MorphOS key per O.D.B. Come on help a brother out. I guess I could always sell plasma and save up for it.

@fairlanefastback

Great!

And Crumb, *maybe* there will be some kind of "lite" license down the road? Personally I believe that a "forked" license - one "ultimate" and one "lite" would be a way forward. I have no idea if anyone listened to that, but who knows? If so, maybe this would be the opening for you (and me, if I haven't found another way by then already)?

Anyway Crumb, hope to see you around in the future as well, registered or not!

@Nitro

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There are many voices advocating a shift from USD to EUR as the global trade currency. Which is kind of interesting. A few years ago there wasn't even a currency called "Euro"...

@takemehomegrandma

I see more chances of USA+Mexico+Canada adopting US Dollars than USA adopting Euro as currency.

But you are lucky because most of the products still sell in dollars... if chinese producers sold items in Euros instead of dollars you would be screwed.

@ takemehomegrandma

I seem to remember a RPG game (not on computer but with books) maybe 15 years ago, where everyone used Euro dollars. Can't remember the name of it.

@Crumb

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Well, I *wasn't* talking about US (and/or its "in laws") adapting Europe's currency on a local level!

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Well today, all international transactions, *all* export/import prices *around the globe* are set in USD.

*ALL* countries *both* exports and imports. And *all* prices are set in USD. And that currency isn't stable.

Some wins and some loses in a short term USD price drop (or vice versa).

And this latest price drop has been extremely drastic. It has affected the world economy. And fact is, while the USD has bounced up and down during the years, it has lately been completely falling through the floor, while the EUR has remained *stable*.

And the one and only thing that is appreciated on the financial market is *stability*!

Beyond that, price is set by the simple economic law of supply and demand!

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Hmm, I actually recall that too (or was it from a book?). Without further memories, unfortunately...