Petition to formally recognize open source work as civic service in Germany

Aren't those kind of reimbursements usually strictly capped?

For example, if you do volunteer work in The Netherlands you can get at most €5.60/hour, with a maximum of €210/month and €2100/year. I assume Germany will have similar rules.

€12/hour is just about minimum wage. Explaining how that isn't a salary is going to be pretty much impossible - it'll rightfully be interpreted as tax fraud. On top of a violation of labor laws for paying less than minimum wage, of course.

I do see a lot of benefits, though. There are plenty of people who aren't well-off who are doing incredibly valuable work for F/LOSS project. If you're holding a conference you really want to be able to invite those people without putting the burden of travel expenses on them: a €200 train ticket can easily be a dealbreaker for a poor student.

You make it sound as signing the petition will result directly in a law with exactly that text. It is just a petition, so that some commission on the parliament takes that idea, discuss, process it, and eventually will be integrated in a law, where all that concerns will hopefully be addressed. If you want to be sure this discussion is worked with your ideas and ideology, make sure to vote correctly in the parliamentary elections. But not asking the parliament to initiate a debate, because a term in there is “poorly” defined, seems to me, not the best way of action.

There are usually strict requirements and checks on public services, so you can't just declare everything open source and gain the benefits. Additionally, paying a wage seems to be forbidden, only covering a certain amount of expenses, like travel costs, or I guess server-costs, is allowed. So you would need a very creative company to somehow convince people to work for them with this.

Maybe, but in the US, we can't deduct "sweat equity."

I probably do hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of work, for free. It would be nice to be able to use some of that, as a tax break. It would be a drop in the bucket, compared to the monster breaks corporations get.

I would be more worried about rigidly defining "open source." We see battles on HN, about the definition of "open source." It could end up specifying something like only release of GPL-licensed code is allowed, which might seem OK, but that's sort of taking a "political" stance.

I release all my stuff MIT (usually). That's mainly because I don't care if anyone takes it, and gets rich (Fat chance, anyway. My stuff isn't that amazing), and I'm not interested in coercing anyone else to take my political stance. I just don't want some bunghole suing me for something out of my control.

How does software differ from other civic service work here and why should it differ?

I don't know about Germany but in Belgium “you cannot do voluntary work for a private individual or a business.”

I don't think it'll go down as you said, but imagining if it does anyways: so what? As long as the software ends up FOSS, everyone would be able to take advantage of it, even if the corporations focus on their own uses first.

Hell, most FOSS today was created by a single individual/organization for themselves, figured it might be useful for others so they publish it under some FOSS-compatible license. That then others found it useful is the cherry on the top, not the core motivation.

> I oppose that petition since "open source" is a vaguely defined term, and might not be clearly seperable from commercial work.

it's a petition, not a law proposal

Interestingly there is a DIN standard for open source hardware https://www.dinmedia.de/en/technical-rule/din-spec-3105-1/32...

Open source is defined by the Open Source Initiative: https://opensource.org/osd

At least it should be. I'm not sure what definition this petition would use.

The German government should set up institutions that employ programmers to work on open source programs that benefit the German people.

Just like they pay for research programs.

what kind of projects are you calling "bad open source being net harmful for public interest" ?

We shouldn't shoot down good ideas just because a bad implementation is possible.

I'm no lawyer or expert on these matters, but I know that Codeberg e.V. is considered charitable, so the people hired by Codeberg should be eligible for this already, I think.

I don't know if KDE e.V. is also considered charitable, but I assume they are, and they also hire developers. I'd be curious to learn how the tax reports in these situations work.

https://techcultivation.org

Germany is a wonderful place — and aside from a few racist remarks when I grew my beard — I'm forever grateful for what that country did to my mental health, career, and future.

Indeed it should be up to Germans to decide how to handle this, but given their general respect for The Common Good, I'm positive about such a law. Godspeed!

I think point a) is actually backwards and potentially counterproductive to the petition's stated goals.

The petition explicitly highlights maintainer burnout and the "unausgewogene Verantwortungslast" (unbalanced responsibility burden) as core problems. Excluding project owners/maintainers from recognition would exclude precisely the people carrying the heaviest load – the ones triaging issues at 2am, reviewing PRs, making architectural decisions, and bearing the psychological weight of knowing critical infrastructure depends on their continued engagement.

The XZ Utils incident is instructive here: the attack vector was specifically a burned-out solo maintainer who was socially engineered because he was overwhelmed and desperate for help. If anything, recognition and support structures should prioritize these individuals, not exclude them. Your concern about "pet projects with no impact" is valid, but the solution isn't to exclude owners categorically – it's to define impact criteria. A threshold based on adoption metrics, dependency chains, or inclusion in public infrastructure would filter out portfolio projects without penalizing the people doing the most critical work.

Point c) also seems problematic for similar reasons: much of maintainer work isn't "merged contributions" – it's code review, issue triage, documentation, community management, security response. Under your criteria, the person who reviews and merges 500 PRs per year while writing none themselves would receive no recognition.

The petition is trying to address a structural problem where society extracts massive value from unpaid labor while providing no support structures. Excluding the most burdened participants seems like it would perpetuate rather than solve that problem.

Any time you introduce an explicit incentive, however small, to open source work the unintended consequences can become a problem.

The Hacktoberfest incident is a good example: The program offered a T-shirt to people who had a PR accepted. The result was tens of thousands of useless PRs across open source repos and maintainers begging for the program to stop so they could stop dealing with useless PRs. https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama

In a situation like this you can’t assume that the set of people and the type of work being submitted will remain the same as before the incentive appears.

> if your contribution is not merged in, it should not count as "work done"

I highly disagree with this. Sometimes someone has to do the work to discover that isn't the work that should be done. As an example, last week, I got in a fight with the Go scheduler: https://github.com/php/frankenphp/pull/2016 -- in the end, we were able to find the one-liner that is a happy-medium. I didn't open that PR, but I did the work; if that makes sense.

Agree but... these would be hard and expensive to assess objectively, in particular point b.

How do you handle projects where the owner is part of a large community? Maintainers of very important or useful projects should count, right?

All my silly pet projects which are otherwise quite useless, were nonetheless very useful as didactic exercises.

Would Linux count as a project with corpo sponsors?

To add some details actually; we were concerned about three major points:

1. The project would deal with user's data to some degree

2. The project was going to "annoy" an existing, much larger, project who would have likely tried to take some legal action to keep their "place at the top"

3. The project was going to both a) need to generate funds (and pay core developers), and b) be guaranteed to generate funds, based on our experience. However, we did not want to register a company as not having a company complicate things was one of the central goals of the split from the larger project. Try paying people a couple hundred bucks (less than minimum wage, more like Aufwandsentschaedigung) without having to jump through various hoops and without doing it illegally.

An e.V. in Germany mostly makes sense if it is also charitable. You will have a hard time justifying that for an arbitrary FOSS project.

There are about 100 categories that are predeclared as potentially charitable and you have to fit into one of them. Most of them are weirdly specific like homing-pigeon breeding or model plane flying.

The only two that are broader and remotely realistic candidates for a FOSS project are religion and education.

If you don't want to start a cult you are left with education. That is as how organizations like Chaos Computer Club do it. Education means education for the general public though and it is not enough if you offer occasional courses for a niche topic. It has to be something that potentially interests everyone. The tax office is checking that and it is on you proof it to them regularly.

How does the tax-payer lose money on this? Is there money from the government involved here?

it is, but the threshold for mandated debate is high. So high in fact that this doesn't really happen at all. Usually, petitions like this are mostly a PR vehicle. A lot of them is also a bit underspecific in what exactly they are requesting of what political entity.

It's worse, gravity is constantly trying to kill us, and the sun bombards us with lethal radiation.

Maybe the good old “lines of code” days will make a comeback?

With a clock?

For non Germans, can you explain what this would mean? I read a machine translation of the article, and basically it seemed to be claiming that forming a tax exempt open source foundation in Germany would be easier if this were approved? But I may be missing some nuance in both the translation and the German legal and tax system to fully understand it?

In the USA, open source foundations can be non-profits, usually they are formed for scientific, and sometimes maybe educational purposes. (The allowed exempt purposes of a 501(c)(3), the most common type used for open source foundations, are "charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals".) There are other requirements that must be met for exemption as well.

I am curious how German and US laws differ in this regard, if you happen to know more about it. Thanks!

> Many open source projects are done without any good for the public

Such as? By definition, open source projects are provided to the public, for free. That’s obviously a good for the public.

Note that in order for something to be a public service, it need not be useful for every member of the public. Most people have no interest in curling, but that doesn’t mean running a non-profit curling club that is open to everyone isn’t a public good.

I do volunteer work as a treasurer in a charity and I disagree on Ehrenämter being stupid and pointless, but otherwise I agree.

The petitioners seem to be blissfully unaware how civil service is recognized in Germany. Or they are all too much aware and want to undermine transparency requirements by asking for special treatment for open source developers. The charity principle requires to assume the former.

For example, this would allow an open source project to split donations between contributors in a legal way

Apparantly you can receive up to 840€ per year tax free for it?

Maybe you are right and an Verein would be a better venue for this. What are your concerns with Ehrenämtern?

> I don't see the point

> Therefore I'm against this

Dude.

They would need to have performed miracles, and also have died.

As someone who has worked for the government, I think you at least mistaken or very naive if you think that.

How so?

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All that work, for free, to allow you to complain about people writing free software. Entitled, you are.

Not really, I mean I don't "complain" about companies using my code and I don't demand much. I'm happy if they're honest enough to send me patches back. But if I know that my code is being used by German companies, then, as a German, it's only fair to ask for some breadcrumbs back (about 40-50% of your income goes to the state in Germany, it's not like the US). We could make "everything private only", but then it becomes very hard for people to start their own startups as they have to pay for every little thing, like in the 90s.

I do take responsibility for the code I write, often way more than some company CEOs ("just sell it bro"). I try to make efforts, but in the end I have physical limits. And many open-source developers are like that. It's more "well if we would put some miniscule effort to supporting open source, we'd all be better of, more sovereign, more independent of Big Tech, more innovation, etc. etc." - sure, not every GH project is "innovation", but many are, so just make some org where you could more easily apply for public funding, problem solved.

What I do at least demand is that the Jobcenter stops bothering me to "get a real job" (thankfully they're very lenient at least where I live). Or that there are more opportunities for funding Open Source. There are initiatives like the Prototype Fund, which is at least a start, but they are only spending about €1.8 million per year, which is literal pocket change for the German government. Meanwhile literal billions go to weapons development for random foreign countries.

I don't think 1, 2, and 4 apply to many high profile open source projects.

yea its wild