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

Petition to pretend that we don’t live in a global dystopia and we can contribute to a global commons without it being co-opted by transnational corporations that will eventually harvest all our emotional attachments

I see the danger of corporations "reimbursing" people to work on very specific plugins and extensions, that coincidentally match the requirement of the corporation, at 12€/hour to evade taxes, social security contributions and minimum wage. As a German, I oppose that petition since "open source" is a vaguely defined term, and might not be clearly seperable from commercial work.

I'm a big fan of Germany -- my most enjoyable vacation was riding around DE on DB, I've done some German language classes and read extensively about it's history. (I think people hyperfocus on WWII out of morbid curiosity and skip over the atrocities of the Stasi.)

The last time I was there, I had the poor luck to schedule my train out of Berlin as a protest was being held. People were super polite, parting ways for me then going back to their thing. One of the leaders must have heard through the grapevine I was a travelling academic and tried to put me on the spot if I "supported" the protest. (They were unhappy about the Trans Pacific Partnership).

I told him I study privacy, not law nor economics so I don't feel qualified to comment on a trade agreement, but I certainly support their right to express their opinion.

And with that, what very little hostility I'd encountered that day vanished, and I went off to eat my currywurst, drink my beer, and watch some videos on my laptop while waiting for my train.

I'm going to pause and say maybe this is the kind of policy question we should leave to the citizens of said country... it seems to center around extremely technical terms in a legal system a lot of us on (overwhelmingly American) HN have very little understanding.

Germany has a history of being extremely supportive of open source -- when I was exploring the clubs, the only black shirt I had was one with a giant Firefox logo, and I got a lot of postive feedback and even let past the line at one place, so I'd be curious what German citizens have to say on the matter before forming my own opinion.

Great idea, I think there should be some conditions.

a) you should not be the owner (to avoid pet projects that are not actually useful) of the project or at least not the sole owner

b) ideally it should be some high impact projects that have little to no corpo sponsors as opposed to something like React

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

In Germany, as I understand it, civic service can only be performed if you are "hired" by a recognized host organization, and host organizations must be non-profit, public, or community-benefit organizations.

So most certainly wouldn't be just "committing to Github projects from home", it would require a host organization to actually the legwork and get itself approved as non-profit but also as a host of civic services.

And knowing German bureaucracy, the above is not easy. ;)

This is absolutely the correct next step. When considering starting a pretty sizeable FOSS project in the past (was going to be AGPL-3, we had a team and had just left another project to start this), we considered registering an e.V. in Germany, for many of the same benefits. Ultimately, the team disbanded for other reasons, but if this was in place, we would have likely been able to start much earlier and the team would not have disbanded most likely.

We were concerned about finances and legal protection.

Without open source there would be no code writing LLMs. It is charity of the highest order (to say the least).

Why not petition to change § 52 AO directly? I made such a petition a couple of years ago but didn't get around to promote it: https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/anerkennung-der-...

Shouldn't open source be funded like scientific research is funded?

Are these petitions anything like what they've got in UK? IIRC in UK petitions that receive some threshold of votes must be debated in the parliament. Is this petition like that? Anyone from Germany can throw some light on how seriously these petitions are taken?

By the headline I thought they were talking about allowing one to contribute to OS instead of the newly introduced military service, that would be too good of a deal to be true.

Not against it but how do you track time spent on it?

Also waiting for a prolific open source contributor to be canonized as a saint.

Nice, signed!

The license has to be central to something like this, and it has got to be copyleft and/or even some sort of nationalist German-MIT license that only grants permission to German citizens and companies. You can't let the German taxpayer get exploited for the benefit of foreign corporations.

The "spirit of open source" is not real. If you think that the only real gift is MIT-style permissively licensed stuff, you should be proud not to be recognized by the government. You should ask for no credit and no reward. Christmas gifts you buy for someone are taxed, and are not considered charitable contributions.

Otherwise, it is a great and vital idea. "Open source" is just not specific enough. It may even exclude GPL.

Terrible deal for the German taxpayer. Excellent deal for Amazon et. al.

I mean sure why not?

As long as contributions happen in good faith and not just for the sake of contributing, but I'm assuming there's already a system in place to ensure that for other civic services.

What is the point? What benefits does an Ehrenamt even bring (fyi I have one) and why would an activity as broad as open source work qualify? Many open source projects are done without any good for the public, why should such a developer get such a title?

If you want any of this, why don't you found a Verein and have open source activities as the purpose?

All in all I an very much against this. Mostly because I think Ehrenämter, as they exist now, are pretty stupid and pointless and because I strongly believe the state should not get involved with this at all.

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Logic of open source:

1. I don't want to take responsibility for anything I do.

2. That's why I give away my work for free, so nobody has any right to complain. And so I don't have to be embarrassed of any shortcomings.

3. Some people take all my work and give me nothing back.

4. Now I get really angry that I didn't get anything for all the work I did!

5. So I demand that the government steps in and takes responsibility! And that they give me money and tax benefits!