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.

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.

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.

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

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.